"Toward a “Grander Strategy of Containing Putin’s Russia”: Ambassador Michael McFaul on Engagement and Containment in a New Era of Great Power Competition" in The Yale Review of International Studies http://yris.yira.org/comments/5314 (June 2021)
The Well-Tempered Critic, p. 140
"Quotes"
Context: The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.
“I don’t want to work away
Doing just what they all say”
But I Might Die Tonight
Song lyrics, Tea for the Tillerman (1970)
“People under pressure don’t work better; they just work faster.”
Source: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (1987), p. 18.
Caxtoniana: Hints on Mental Culture (1862)
“Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.”
Source: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
“Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.
Information is control.”
Source: The Year of Magical Thinking
nbcnews.com http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview/naive-gravely-mistaken-analysts-rebut-snowden-claims-n117101
2014
“Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work.”
Literature and Life, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Context: Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
