There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
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.
The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.
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.
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
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.
The jargon of 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.
All great art is born of the metropolis.
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.
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
