More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.

Art is long, and critics are the insects of a day.