“What else can love do? If we’re selling it, we’d better point out that it’s a starting-point for civic virtue. You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you [...]
“Magic is never destroyed - the most we can do is cut ourselves off, amputate the mysterious antennae which serve to connect us with forces beyond our power of understanding.”
“The concept of an autonomous ‘haptic’ sense, that allows the apprehension of form and space independently of optics and acoustics, is not difficult to accept, and this may simply lie buried beneath the visual assessment in all but those who are born blind. But for a minority, the haptic sense remains the primary orientation. Such [...]
“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
“No artist dares to prove anything. Even things that are true can’t be proved.”
“All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those that go beneath the surface do so at their own peril.
Those that read the symbol do so at their peril.”
“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any of the bystanders could have explained those poems better than their actual authors. So I soon made up my mind about the poets too: I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled them to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such [...]