Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

Literature is news that stays news.

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.