Henry

“Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity,” said Coco Chanel.”
― Scott Galloway, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

“No. Tocqueville said that humour would be bred out of them by sheer diversity. Anything witty was bound to offend someone. He thought they’d reach the point where nobody’d dare say anything at all.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“Early advice, or early commandments, can be pernicious. I love the short stories of Alice Munro; but someone must have told her, when she was little, to shun everyday contractions like ‘couldn’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ and ‘hadn’t’ (for example, ‘[Enid had to tell Rupert] that she could not swim. And that would not be a lie…she had not learned to swim’). It makes for a choppy, counter-conversational forward flow. But in the end all those nots only amount to a flesh wound: bits of buckshot on the body of Munro’s prose…Whoever introduced Henry James to the joys of EV (see below) has systemic ills to answer for – among them gentility and evasiveness.”
― Martin Amis, Inside Story

“I like his rather belligerent hospitality,’ said Martin. ‘Perhaps it’s infantile of me but everything is so thoroughly planned that the torments of choice disappear.”
― Edward St Aubyn, Parallel Lines