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.

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.

We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.

One of the most obvious uses of literature, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance... Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities.

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