What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.

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.

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

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.

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.