At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.

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

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

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.

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

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader--it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting--it lives too much and I dislike its life--I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!

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