Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One
Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.
The Bible is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible is built mainly out of fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and that singular heaven I have told you about.
Khomeini obviously had many problems, but he had one clever side to him. He never made economic promises to people and as a result, he never led to dissatisfaction in this perspective. Because they need to get votes, they use misleading slogans. And this leads to rising expectations. I had a personal experience.
I've always felt that improv looks and feels more clever when you're there to experience it live than when you have the degree of separation that television creates. Television raises expectations.
The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.