Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.

Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.

In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.