We fear something before we hate.

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.

Everyone has the right to express an opinion. No one has the right to be listened to.

No taste is so acquired as that for someone else's quality of mind.

Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems