Ariel Levy Quotes

One can always debate questions back and forth.

I think that perhaps the classic propagandists of the - in the Second World War was Winston Churchill. He was extremely skilled and adept at it.

I'm a better polemicist in prose.

Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn't meant to convince anybody of anything.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

I'm a fan of robust debate, and I'm not averse to engaging in the odd ad hominem attack myself.

I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.

My protagonists, male and female, are me.

If you can somehow force a liberal into a point-counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you’ve said - unless you were in fact talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It’s like arguing with someone with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Golf is the only-est sport. You're completely alone with every conceivable opportunity to defeat yourself. Golf brings out your assets and liabilities as a person. The longer you play, the more certain you are that a man's performance is the outward manifestation of who, in his heart, he really thinks he is.

I never saw an instance of one or two disputants convincing the other by argument.

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti- communism already has.

I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

One nice thing about putting the thing away for a couple of months before looking at it is that you start appreciate your own wit. Of course, this can be carried too far. But it's kind of cool when you crack up a piece of writing, and then realize you wrote it. I recommend this feeling.

--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. --But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.

And when I give thanks for the seemingly microscopic, I make a place for God to grow within me.

So you see how endlessly futile and fruitless it would be if we wanted to refute their objections every time they obstinately resolved not to think through what they say but merely to speak, just so long as they contradict our arguments in any way they can.

I'm obsessed with the human psyche. I want to understand. I want to ask myself if I have it inside me.

Remember, passing judgment on someone else's character, is only a reflection of your own.

To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions, when the hour arrives in which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a journal: a journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole heart!

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?