“Our indirect methods have taught us a mountain of things about horses, but if you wished to learn even more, would you rather be Whirlaway in the stretch, than interview Eddie Arcaro afterwards?”

It is not possible to scan the universe as it is to scan the self. Know the self and you know the universe.
Young India (8 April 1926)
1920s

Source: A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary

Young India (8 April 1926)
1920s

How I Write: John Banville on ‘Ancient Light,’ Nabokov, and Dublin (2012)

Free Speech and Plain Language (1936)
Context: In general I wish we were in the habit of conveying our meanings in plain explicit terms rather than by indirection and by euphemism, as we so regularly do. My point is that habitual indirection in speech supports and stimulates a habit of indirection in thought; and this habit, if not pretty closely watched, runs off into intellectual dishonesty.
The English language is of course against us. Its vocabulary is so large, it is so rich in synonyms, it lends itself so easily and naturally to paraphrase, that one gets up a great facility with indirection almost without knowing it. Our common speech bristles with mere indirect intimations of what we are driving at; and as for euphemisms, they have so far corrupted our vernacular as to afflict us with a chronic, mawkish and self-conscious sentimentalism which violently resents the plain English name of the realities that these euphemisms intimate. This is bad; the upshot of our willingness to accept a reality, provided we do not hear it named, or provided we ourselves are not obliged to name it, leads us to accept many realities that we ought not to accept. It leads to many and serious moral misjudgments of both facts and persons; in other words, it leads straight into a profound intellectual dishonesty.

Source: The King of Attolia

Source: Sins of the Night

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)