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

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

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

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.

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

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

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.