The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.

The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.

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

There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.

Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

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.