“Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.”
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Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
