Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
In the most secret heart of every intellectual … there lies hidden … the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony.
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.