Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.