An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.

It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.

It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.