This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

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

Immature ists imitate. Mature ists steal.

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.

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

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.

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