Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

Russian literature, like colonial Canadian literature, comes with a lot of landscape backdrop.

A lot of poems seem, in some sense, to pull the outside world into the interior. They aren't perhaps emotion recollected in tranquillity but perception recollected in interiority.

Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.