“The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.”
Tip: press → for another quote, C to copy, S to share.
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.