All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf. |
Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing / he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him. |
Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere. |
Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of romantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of ''ideals',' of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only: he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax. |
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. |
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal. |
In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. |
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 |
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect. |
Probably it is impossible for humor to be ever a revolutionary weapon. Candide can do little more than generate irony. |
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. |
The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal. |
The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals. |
The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy. |