“A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.”

“A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.”

“A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.”

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”

“All great art is born of the metropolis.”

“But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.”

“Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.”

“Either move or be moved.”

“Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.”

“Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.”

“Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.”

“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”

“Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.”

“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”

“I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.”

“I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.”

“If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.”

“If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.”

“If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.”

“Literature is news that stays news.”

“Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”

“Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”

“No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.”

“Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.”

“The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.”

“The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.”