Lee Siegel > Quotes

“I'm writing a book on magic”, I explain, and I'm asked, “Real magic?” By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. “No”, I answer: “Conjuring tricks, not real magic”. Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.”
― Lee Siegel, Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India

“Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read.”
― Lee Siegel

“They were learning how to perform their privacy.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleum as I had been by its plaster, paint, and paper replica in the studio; the original posed a dreadfully seductive promise in cool marble of a strangely painful loveliness, a lover's lie that death itself might in some mysterious way, because of love, be lovely.”
― Lee Siegel

“The literary classics are a haven for that part of us that broods over mortal bewilderments, over suffering and death and fleeting happiness. They are a refuge for our secret self that wishes to contemplate the precious singularity of our physical world, that seeks out the expression of feelings too prismatic for rational articulation. They are places of quiet, useless stillness in a world that despises any activity that is not profitable or productive.

Literary art’s sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read….”
― Lee Siegel, Why Argument Matters

“All love songs, no matter how eloquent or crude, ornamented or plain, in whatever language they are sung, say essentially the same thing. All love stories have but one meaning.”
― Lee Siegel

“Everything, taboo and familiar, occurs on the same screen.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“In the end, despite all your careful introspecting, you pay for following your instincts. And the more intensely and honestly you live, the more incessantly you pay. If you have become that particular, irreducible person, you get precisely what you want but no more. This is the unforgiving truth.”
― Lee Siegel

“It's okay, you can do it. Because I am playing with myself as I write this, I hope you're doing the same as you read it. Otherwise there's not much point. Go ahead. Don't be shy or modest, prudish or self-conscious. That's it. It feels nice, doesn't it?”
― Lee Siegel, L'Amour dans une langue morte

“Mandel, who died in 1995, had mastered the art of packaging his interiority, an innovation that would become the driving engine behind Web culture.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“The WELLians were learning how to turn their private experiences into a public commodity.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“It is merely that there is only so much people can do to be happy, no matter what they think they should do.”
― Lee Siegel, The Draw: A Memoir

“The assimilation of taboo images to the everyday language of doing business produces a strange effect. It domesticates the taboo while at the same time making the everyday transactional world more porous, more open to the forbidden. The wolf of unbridled appetite slips into everyday convention in the sheep's clothing of commercial language.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“Life as a writer was not what I expected. I knew no other writers. I knew no writing teachers or editors. I had to draw every last bit of strength from the exalted notions I nursed about myself.”
― Lee Siegel, The Draw: A Memoir

“Every private thought is performed for public consumption, and every leisure moment (from toilet training to lovemaking) is a highly focused search for a specific gratification, guided by experts serving you in their field. No unexpected events or unanticipated human contact need apply.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“The counterculture had sought to practice the idea that creative personal expression was the essence of an authentic existence. The WELL, drawing strength from the Internet culture's belief that the market contains all values, put personal expression up for sale.”
― Lee Siegel, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob

“He only wanted to have as much peace and quiet in his life as possible. He simply didn't realize that pursuing peace and quiet was a full-time, nerve-rattling job.”
― Lee Siegel, The Draw: A Memoir

“Julius, who had a sour, bitter nature, became Groucho. (He was also the quartet’s treasurer, storing their wages in what vaudeville actors called a “grouch bag.”) Adolph, who played the harp, naturally became Harpo. Leonard the pathological womanizer Fisher dubbed Chico, pronounced “Chick-o.” Milton, so the story goes, became Gummo because, as a hypochondriac, he put on waterproof sneakers, known as “gumshoes,” at the first sign of rain. Their”
― Lee Siegel, Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence

“There is a metaphor somewhere in the story Groucho liked to tell about an encounter with one of his most illustrious peers, W. C. Fields. Fields took Groucho up to his attic, where the astonished Groucho discovered, as he later described it, “$50,000 worth of booze up there in boxes. I said ‘Bill, why do you have all that whiskey up here? Don’t you know prohibition is over?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘It may come back.’” In”
― Lee Siegel, Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence

“The same impulse to unman a social or cultural threat gambols across the exchange with Eliot. “Why you haven’t been offered the lead in some sexy movies I can only attribute to the stupidity of casting directors,” writes the movie star to the dour literary man.”
― Lee Siegel, Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence