At this point the theater America is in such a precarious place.
. . . there is no such thing as a rational world and a separate irrational world, but only one world containing both.
Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?
In their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours. Therein lies the significant lesson. . . of their existence. They are an analogy for the intellectual of the future.
It is, all in all, a historic error to believe that the master makes the school; the students make it!
Strong emotional experiences are for the most part impersonal. Anyone who has hated another person so much that only chance stands between that person and death knows this, as does whoever has fallen into the catastrophe of a deep depression, anyone who has loved a woman to the dregs, anyone who has beaten others bloody or ever come up behind another person with muscles trembling. "Losing one's head," language calls it. Emotional experience is, in itself, poor in qualities; qualities are brought to it by the person who has the experience.
. . . the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it.
Death and its associates, after the initial shock, produce callousness.
There is nothing more sickening than talking about poverty over a fancy dinner.
I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.
When times are difficult, I tell myself, 'I'm just passing through. '