WYNDHAM LEWIS QUOTES
English author & painter (1882-1957)
An artist should be as impartial as God.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
The art of advertisement ... has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Promise as an Institution", The Doom of Youth
God is, of course, a terrifying reality. I had thought that I knew all about God, and had Him in a pigeon hole. But I met Him at the corner of a street -- He entered my mind with a bang, and nearly burst my head open.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Red Priest
Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
notes to Kenneth Allott, Contemporary Verse
I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Blasting and Bombardiering
With most people, not describable as artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex. They become third-rate poets during their courtship. All their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is the Artist himself, a new sort of person; the creative man.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
The War went on far too long.... It was too vast for its meaning, like a giant with the brain of a midge. Its epic proportions were grotesquely out of scale, seeing what it was fought to settle. It was far too indecisive. It settled nothing, as it meant nothing. Indeed, it was impossible to escape the feeling that it was not meant to settle anything -- that could have any meaning, or be of any advantage, to the general run of men.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Blasting and Bombardiering
In a period of such obsessing political controversy as the present, I believe that I am that strange animal, the individual without any politics at all.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Time and Western Man
The Future is distant, like the Past, and therefore sentimental. The mere element "Past" must be retained to sponge up and absorb our melancholy. Everything absent, remote, requiring projection in the veiled weakness of the mind, is sentimental.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Blast, 1914
You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain-store; for the peasant against the usurer; for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
British Union Quarterly, 1937
The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
America and Cosmic Man
To begin with, I hold that there is never an end; everything of which our life is composed, pictures and books as much as anything else, is a means only, in the sense that the work of art exists in the body of the movement of life. It may be a strong factor of progress and direction, but we cannot say that it is the end or reason of things, for it is so much implicated with them ; and when we are speaking of art we suddenly find that we are talking of life all the time.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Tyro
Sex is of the same clay as Time! -- of the same clay
Since both are in their essence but One-Way
Time is the one-way dimension: sex its tart
And subtle biological counterpart.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
One-way Song
Instead of the vast organization to exploit the weakness of the Many, should we not possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the Few?
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"The Popularization of Disgust", The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator
The ideal of perfect Success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of man and Perfectibility.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Beyond Action and Reaction", The Art of Being Ruled
The teacher does not have to be, although he has to know: he is the mind imagining, not the executant.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Essential Wyndham Lewis
Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Essential Wyndham Lewis
Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Essential Wyndham Lewis