It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.
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.
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
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.
