The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.

I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.

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.

If the end does not justify the means - what can?

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.