“Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.”
The Book Fool, p. 296.
A History of Reading (1996)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Alberto Manguel 63
writer 1948Related quotes
“We have all, at one time or another, been used, or have experienced someone being unfair to us.”
All shall be well (2014)
“What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?”
Source: A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975), Chapter 1, “Planetfall: The Hawks of Conscience” (p. 33)
“Humanity is now experiencing history's most difficult evolutionary transformation.”
From 1980s onwards, Grunch of Giants (1983)
Speech at the Nobel Banquet (1991)
Context: I certainly find being the recipient at this celebratory dinner more pleasurable and rewarding than chicken-pox, having now in my life experienced both. But the small girl was not entirely wrong. Writing is indeed, some kind of affliction in its demands as the most solitary and introspective of occupations.
Torsten Manns interview <!-- pages 80-81 -->
Bergman on Bergman (1970)
Context: One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations.
Isn't it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I've found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated... Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes... To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated. Our bureaucracy, for instance. I regard it as in high degree built up on humiliation, one of the nastiest and most dangerous of all poisons.
“I pride myself on being incorrigible. I have a very hard time being told what to do.”
As quoted in Guitar World (May 2000).
2000s
Context: Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. … It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It's a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.
As quoted in "J. K. Rowling : The Interview," by Ann Treneman in The Times (30 June 2000) http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2000/0600-times-treneman.html