In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.

Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence- the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.

There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not.

Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football.

The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders.