Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.

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.

We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.

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.

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

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