“Artists are the antennae of the race.”

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.

What thou lovest well remains.

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.

If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.

Don’t be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

The Nazis believed in a master race. The militant Islamists believe in a master faith.

Actually I think I have forgotten how it was back then. Or probably not – I didn’t qualify. There were only 16 cars in the race.

I deplore any action which denies artistic talent an opportunity to express itself because of prejudice against race origin.

Don’t forget I started looking at China a long time before any of those races happened. I always thought go east, not west.

If you join the rat race — you’re in the race of rats.

Conventional history completely ignores half the human race.

I’M HOPEFUL, because I know that while we still have race issues in America, we enjoy a much different normal than those of our parents and grandparents.

In fact, I might be confident for the human race because of what the human race has given me. When I was in the street and bars, people always came up to me and said, “Don’t stop, keep going.”