The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, bet….

We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a t….

Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics..

Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring ima….

We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks..

The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for "literalists," becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old….

A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. Art….

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact t….

The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium..

We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that unea….

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is no….

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature..

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 rea….

Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exc….

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable..

Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds..

Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, su….

The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever 'solve'. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amoun….

For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; ….

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like.

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from h….