There is nothing political about American literature.

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the...

I have seen them stagger out of their movie palaces and blink their empty eyes in the face of reality once more, and stagger home, to read the Times, to find out what’s going on...

The greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die.

Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.

Harper: You, the one part ofthe real world I wasn’t allergic to.

Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …

Twas noontide of summer,And mid-time of night;And stars, in their orbits,Shone pale, thro’ the lightOf the brighter, cold moon,’Mid planets her slaves,Herself in the Heavens,Her beam on the waves.I gazed awhileOn her cold smile;Too cold–too...

children of the mist” – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks...

Serving time doesn’t make you fit to do anything but serve more time.