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.

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.

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

We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

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