“Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.”

“And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.”

“One must own that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment.”

“If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet.”

“The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.”

“Dualism... Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.”