some quotes
EP1
Chesterton: Some people think the English poor should be helped further to colonise the colonies. Some of who I am one, have even dared to dream that English might be allowed to colonise England. For Woolf, the novel as a form couldn't save the world, but it might be able to show the true poetry of the ordinary mind on an ordinary day. A technique known as a stream of consciousness. Evelyn Waugh - Why are you appearing in this program? - Poverty. We've both been hired to talk in this deliriously happy way. - Looking at yourself, because I'm sure you're a self critical person. What do you feel is your worst fault? - Irritability. - Irritability with your family, with strangers? - Absolutely everything. Elizabeth Bowen: People were so conscious of themselves, and of each other, and of their personal relationships, because they thought that everything of that time might soon end. Jean Rhys: When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. Graham Greene: Boredom has always been my besetting sickness, as in a kind of manic depressive. There's a sense in myself that the ice is thin and I shouldn't stay in one place too long, or the ice will break. He was a bore who was going to destroy my world, as it were. EP2
George Lamming: In England, nobody notices anybody else. You pass me in the street, or sit next to me in train, as if I come from the next planet. Nobody ask questions, and nobody give answers. You see this the minute you put foot in London. The way that how this is built, is people don't have nothing to do with one another.
Ian Fleming: Particularly since the last war, we all become much more educated in what really is violence, sadism, savagery and so on.
John Le Carre: I think it's a great mistake if one's talking about espionage literature, to include Bond in this category at all. It seems to me he is more of international gangster, with a licence to kill. He's a man with unlimited movement, but he's a man entirely out of political context. It's of no interest to Bond who, for instance is the president of United States, or who is the president of Soviet Union. It's the comsumer goods ethics, really, that everything around you, all the dull things of life, are suddenly animated, by this wonderful cachet of espionage. With the things on our desk that could explode, our ties that could suddenly take photographs. This give a drab and materialistic existence a kind of magic.
John Wyndham: Somebody once said half of fantacy is the willing suspension of disbelief. Well, you must not go beyond a certain barrier, if you find it, in which that willing suspension is shattered.
EP3
Angela Carter: You could see that it was not inevitable or natural that women should want to be pretty or beautiful.
Martin Amis: He's scholarly about sex and sexual about scholarship. He's read up on sex.
There is a great convulsion of stupidity happening in the world. People know a little about a lot, and put very little effort into accumulating knowledge and culture. And when they do, it's almost like a consumerism of culture. What I'm trying to write is about a landscape where there is no literature or culture. He comes across it, he encounters culture in various forms, in art galleries, in opera houses, and when he meets me ... But he can't make known sense of it, he has nothing to fall back on to interpret it.
