Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.