Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing - he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

Immature ists imitate. Mature ists steal.

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

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.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.