Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I don't know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

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

Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.

I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society.

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.

[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.