George Steiner

I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs. ”

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. ”

Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do. ”

Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate. ”

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives. ”

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life. ”

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness. ”

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger. ”

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war. ”

Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge. ”