"Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals."
"My career as a critic still lay in the future but unconsciously I may have been preparing for it. They were not easy companions, these intellectuals I was now getting to know. They were overbearing and arrogant, excessively competitive; they lacked magnanimity and often they lacked common courtesy. But they were intellectually energetic and - this particularly attracted me - they were proof against cant."
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Source: Diana Trilling (1993). “The Beginning of the Journey: The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling”, Harcourt
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