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.

Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

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.

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

Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.

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