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.
From Lionel Trilling
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.
The immature artist imitates. Mature artists steal.
What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking.
Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.
It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.
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