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.

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

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

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

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

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.