Life & Wisdom Quote by George Woodcock

Woodcock’s modesty isn’t the cozy, self-effacing kind; it’s the hard-edged humility of someone who has watched talent get swallowed by history. The opening, “I suppose,” is doing heavy lifting: a shrug that doubles as a shield. He’s not offering a grand thesis about genius or fate. He’s insisting, almost defensively, that experience forced this recalibration. The sentence moves like a man backing into a confession.

What happened to his contemporaries is left conspicuously vague, and that vagueness is the point. It lets the reader pour in the usual twentieth-century suspects: careers derailed by war, ideology, exile, drink, the long attrition of small magazines and smaller audiences. Woodcock, an anarchist-leaning intellectual and critic, lived through decades when political commitment could elevate a writer into a moral beacon or reduce them to a cautionary footnote. “People whom I’ve admired” signals loyalty; “people who I thought were ten times better than me” signals the old hierarchy of promise. Then comes the twist: “I may have been right.” It lands with dry irony, but also grief.

The subtext is survival as an aesthetic category. Woodcock isn’t crowning himself best; he’s acknowledging that “better” in youth often means brighter, riskier, more incandescent, and therefore more breakable. The line quietly suggests that longevity, steadiness, and adaptability are their own kind of talent - not glamorous, not romantic, but real. Admiration remains, yet it’s now braided with the cold arithmetic of who got to keep writing.