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

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

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.

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

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

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

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