Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts. . . Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.
Real unity tolerates dissent and rejoices in variety of outlook and tradition, recognizes that it is man's destiny to unite and not divide, and understands that creating proletariats and scapegoats and second-class citizens is a mean and contemptible activity.
This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays.
If you love your children, if you love your country, if you love the God of love, clear your hands from slaves, burden not your children or your country with them.
But we have reached a turning-point. We must make a decision: shall we remain a child-like people, giving little thought to our Future, till someday we find that we have none?
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.