Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.

To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

Americans began by loving youth, and now, out of adult self-pity, they worship it.