There Is Only One Way To Degrade

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.

Literature Speaks The Language Of The Imagination, And The Study Of Literature Is Supposed To Train And Improve The Imagination.

Man Lives, Not Directly Or Nakedly In Nature Like The Animals, But Within A Mythological Universe, A Body Of Assumptions And Beliefs Developed From His Existential Concerns.

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.

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 Amount Of Thinking About The Questions.