We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.

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

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

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

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

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

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.