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

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.

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.

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

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

Americans like to make money, Canadians like to count it.

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art for art's sake is a retreat from criticism which ends in an impoverishment of civilized life itself.