Irving Howe Quotes

#1. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

Irving Howe

#2. Language rarely lies. It can reveal the insincerity of a writer's claims simply through a grating adjective or an inflated phrase. We come upon a frenzy of words and suspect it hides a paucity of feeling.

Irving Howe

#3. The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.

Irving Howe

#4. Modernity consists in a revolt against the prevailing style, an unyielding rage against the official order.

Irving Howe

#5. No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

Irving Howe

#6. Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Irving Howe

#7. Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.

Irving Howe

#8. One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve.

Irving Howe

#9. Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.

Irving Howe

#10. Society now hovers over mankind like a crushing weight, sometimes it seems with a willful malevolence.

Irving Howe

#11. The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

Irving Howe

#12. Good readers make much out of little.

Irving Howe

#13. The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

Irving Howe