The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring..

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 ….

Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats..

The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death mea….

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so..

I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our socie….

The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it..

Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children's play, or ….

Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading..

Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civil….

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world..

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be….

One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind..

Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind..

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels..

Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution..

Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worshi….

Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the la….

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to t….

War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism..

Americans like to make money, Canadians like to count it..