In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.

One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

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

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.