He said a nice thing about some of my poems.
"I am a connoisseur of American stupidity."Here are some of his remarks:
• There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
• At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited.
• History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
• At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.
• The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country
— and we haven't seen them since.
• I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race.
• Must one have a heart of stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing?
(In life, practically no one ever gets to kill the thing he hates, much less loves.)
• In fact, the French - who read and theorise the most - became so addicted to political experiment
that in the two centuries since our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced
one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics.
That's what happens when you take writing too seriously.
• Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.
• Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.
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