The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.