“Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.”
“The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.”
“Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.”
“I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.”
“Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.”
“In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.”
“A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.”
“The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.”
“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.”
“The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.”
“There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, ''It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.''”
“Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.”
“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.”
“The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.”
“If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.”
“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and clichT, not from real life.”
“As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.”
“Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.”
“It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.”
“The real meditation is... the meditation on one's identity. Ah, voila une chose!! You try it. You try finding out why you're you and not somebody else. And who in the blazes are you anyhow? Ah, voila une chose!”
“If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.”
“All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.”
“'Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape's turn for a night or two.”
“A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.”
“It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.”
“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.”
“We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.”
“It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved. This hypothesis would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.”
“One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.”
“There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle ''promise'' from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.”