“We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us. ”

“Man… is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has… a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love…”

“Our culture tends "to regard the mere energy of impulse as being in every mental and moral way equivalent and even superior to defined intention." Instead we should consider "an idea that once was salient in western culture: the idea of "making a life", by which was meant conceiving human existence, one's own or another's, as if it were a work of art upon which one might pass judgment.... This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.”

“I see no reason in morality, why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no grounds for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc.”

“Immature artists imitate.Mature artists steal.”

“Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”

“At a time in our culture when violence was achieving a new legitimacy as a form of public assertion, there was perhaps a special pathos in the idea of a woman so obviously foreign to extreme behavior, whose life had been dedicated to respectability and convention, being suddenly driven to such desperate conduct. [Jean Harris's] action spoke of depths of suffering and despair far beyond what most of us are pushed to though surely of the same basic stuff as the everyday pain that’s woven into our experience.It forced upon us a fresh realization that behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there’s a terrible human capacity that may one day overwhelm any of us.”