Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.

Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.

By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.

Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor.

If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.