“Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.”

“Unless we are willing to accept our artists as they are, the answer to the question, "Who speaks for America today?" will have to be: the advertising agencies. They are entirely capable of showing us our unparalleled prosperity and our almost classless society, and no one has ever accused them of not being affirmative. Where the artist is still trusted, he will not be looked to for assurance. Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is , as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.”

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”

“In short, I am amenable to criticism, but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not pretend to do otherwise.”

“No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.”

“There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”

“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”