Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth.

The relation between life and literature - a final antimony - is one of mutual plagiarism.

The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate.

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

The comic element is the incorrigible element in every human being; the capacity to learn, from experience or instruction, is what is forbidden to all comic creations and to what is comic in you and me.

This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?

The strongest argument for the un-materialistic character of American life is that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable.