Coleridge’s description of Iago’s actions as “motiveless malignancy” applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian villains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive, and,...

Say this city has ten million souls,Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

And maps can really point to placesWhere life is evil now:Nanking. Dachau.

Funeral BluesStop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drumBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overheadScribbling on...

Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;Gide, though I didn’t know it then, gave part.They taught me to express my deep abhorrenceIf I caught anyone preferring ArtTo Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart.I...

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.

After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits...

The Ogre does what ogres can,Deeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach:The Ogre cannot master speech.About a subjugated plain,Among it’s desperate and slain,The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,While drivel gushes...

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, ‘I know what I like,’ he is really saying ‘I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my...

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to...

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private...

There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.

We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of no account.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this...

A child’s reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different...

Lay your sleeping head, my love,Human on my faithless arm;

We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.

Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a...

In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.

Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there’s a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that’s genuinely goodFrom one...

As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two:...

All I have is a voice.

I will love you forever” swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. “I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday” – Is that still as easy?

In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pride in...

A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or...

I know nothing, except what everyone knows – if there when Grace dances, I should dance.