The Operations Of The Human Mind Are

The Twentieth Century Saw An Amazing Development Of Scholarship And Criticism In The Humanities, Carried Out By People Who Were More Intelligent, Better Trained, Had More Languages, Had A Better Sense Of Proportion, And Were Infinitely More Accurate Scholars And Competent Professional Men Than I. I Had Genius. No One Else In The Field Known To Me Had Quite That.

We Must Reject That Most Dismal And Fatuous Notion That Education Is A Preparation For Life.

One Of The Most Obvious Uses Of Literature, I Think, Is Its Encouragement Of Tolerance... Bigots And Fanatics Seldom Have Any Use For The Arts, Because They're So Preoccupied With Their Beliefs And Actions That They Can't See Them Also As Possibilities.

There Is A Curious Law Of Art... That Even The Attempt To Reproduce The Act Of Seeing, When Carried Out With Sufficient Energy, Tends To Lose Its Realism And Take On The Unnatural Glittering Intensity Of Hallucination.

What If Criticism Is A Science As Well As An Art? Not A Pure Or Exact Science, Of Course, But These Phrases Belong To A Nineteenth-century Cosmology Which Is No Longer With Us.