Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Even the human heart is slightly left of centre.
The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
Americans like to make money, Canadians like to count it.
Advertising - a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.
Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.
We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity.
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.
Most of my writing consists of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.
This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don't mind being that.
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.
Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep.
Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It's a disastrous movement within politics and economics.
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.
Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.
The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas that become a focus of mental activity.
The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It's the world's most patient medium.
One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.
My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him .
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.
The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation,revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse.
It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.
Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.