It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.

A touch of science, even bogus science, gives an edge to the superstitious tale.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

Among the masked dandies of Edwardian comedy, Max Beerbohm is the most happily armored by a deep and almost innocent love of himself as a work of art.

Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.