George Woodcock
George Woodcock
George Woodcockwas a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet and published several volumes of travel writing. In 1959 he was the founding editor of the journal Canadian Literature which was the first academic journal specifically dedicated to Canadian writing. He is most commonly known outside of Canada for his book Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionEssayist
Date of Birth8 May 1912
CountryCanada
I suppose, a person for whom freedom is the most important thing - intellectual freedom and, as far as possible, physical freedom.
Now I am a writer who can command fairly good payments from magazines with large circulations, I very often refuse to write for them and still write sometimes for small magazines for nothing.
I like to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists, people who can tell me something.
It doesn't really mean a great deal of difference to a life. You live as you wish to do and if a job is oppressing, you leave it. I've done it on several occasions.
I was unpopular at school just because I was an intellectual. I always answered all the questions off the top of my head but they nevertheless resented because of that.
My early wounds were the English school system among other things. It wasn't merely the discipline, it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit.
It even has the same phraseology as the English orders of knighthood, companions and this sort of thing.
My split with the university was over the fact that I had become involved with helping Tibetans in India.
When you act dramatically in that way it often has a consequence that is very negative.
I suppose I'm led to do so by the fact of what happened to my contemporaries - people whom I've admired, people who I thought were ten times better than me when I was in my twenties and early thirties. I may have been right.
Orwell was the sort of man who was full of grievances. He was very loyal. Once he got to know you, he was extremely loyal. He hated passionately and irrationally.