The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.

The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!

There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.

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.

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.

There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.