The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn… tired of common sense and civilization.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

At Munich we sold the Czechs for a few months grace, but the disgrace will last as long as history.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

A man can make himself put down what comes, even if it seems nauseating nonsense; tomorrow some of it may not seem wholly nonsense at all.

What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.

And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.

Most style is not honest enough.

Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist.

Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly… in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of revolutionary avant-gardism.

The most emphatic place in a clause or sentence is the end. This is the climax; and, during the momentary pause that follows, that last word continues, as it were, to reverberate in the reader’s...

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

The only hope I can see for the future depends on a wiser and braver use of the reason, not a panic flight from it.