A British Empire ruled by Oscar Wilde (21st May 1997)

A British Empire ruled by Oscar Wilde. 

Eric Cantona enjoyed the photographers crammed around his car, as he refused to answer questions. He relished the abuse. It’s good to be talked about, it proves you exist. Whether it’s good or bad. Nothing bad ever happens. 

Couldn’t I write a straightforward Hemingway story even now? Who have I got? 

Because nobody listens. They just keep asking stupid questions. I love Peter Sellers because he’s fucked up like me. Being There makes me cry, because that’s like me. The last film he made. His lifetime dream because he thought it was about him. Peter Sellers had raging self-hate, that’s why he destroyed all his marriages. It made things worse: From the engagement. Total withdrawal. 

If you go out more, you meet people more, set in chain more possible juxtapositions, like on Monday I went on bus and train and had at least 4 or 5 significant meetings. Get the bus on Friday perhaps?

 

Dreaming my daydreams, writing my stories, without hurting anybody else (17th May 1997)

Dreaming my daydreams, writing my stories, without hurting anybody else, and without trying to disturb anybody else. It's amazing how much abuse that attracts. That's all right. I pretend I am Oscar Wilde, F.G.Lorca. Until I have achievements of my own, I wear theirs like an overcoat. To get abuse thrown at you in the street, you'd think that you must really have hurt someone, but it's not so. It's good. If I am annoying the stupid people, I'm doing the right thing. That's all right. To deliberately try to hurt another human being surely you must be completely obsessed by them. 

The majority of people are of low intelligence and pretty ugly personalities. When they find someone intelligent and beautiful and pure and serene in their midst, they don' t like it. They try to crush you, goad you into being ugly back. I take great pleasure in defying them. I like to remain intelligent and beautiful and pure and serene. So it will continue to eat away at them.

14th May 1997

 

"Deaf and dumb—that is what the French have become"

"Deaf and dumb—that is what the French have become. What pleasure can there be in opposing this stupidity, this weakness, finding happiness despite their eagerness to destroy it, escaping when they believe they have surrounded you, falling in their midst when they've forgotten all about you, splattering them with waves. 

A frivolous and academic race of idiots. Everything I detest. Remarkable minds, noble hearts float on this swamp like wrecks of the charming fleet that once was France and the city of Paris. 

I shall be---all my life and after my death---misrepresented, insulted, calumniated, dragged through the mire. Doubtless I'm paying for the happiness I find in the calm and confidence of those I love. You never stop paying, and you can never pay dearly enough."

Jean Cocteau

"The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently" (9th May 1997)

"The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently. It proves that if you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and if you have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write." "'You want strength, novelty, compactness, intensity of interest, a single vivid impression left upon the mind. Poe is the master of all.'" 

"The detective stories were 'admirable...so wonderful in their masterful force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point'". 

"When Doyle was enthusiastic about a subject it did not have to make sense, and he did not bother to follow it through and weld a story into a logically coherent whole. In a sense, he is the precursor of the children's serials of the 1930s cinema, in which each episode ends on a question mark. How the problem is resolved is of no consequence, provided that it is; he was a victim of the serial-writing habit in which impetus is all."

Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook 

8th May 1997

 

 

Look to the future now (6th May 1997)

Look to the future now.