Quotes

[on J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings"] If someone dislikes it, I shall never trust their literary judgment about anything again.

[observation, 1970] What a pleasant surprise it would be to meet a crew-cut hippie or a company director with hair down to his shoulders.

Even Hifler, I imagine, would have defined his New Jerusalem as a world where there are no Jews, not as a world where they are being gassed by the million day after day in ovens. But he was a Utopian, so the ovens had to come in.

[considering Shakespeare's sonnets] Art may spill over from creating a world of language into the dangerous and forbidden task of trying to create a human being.

I think a great many of us are haunted by the feelings that our society - and I don't mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilization, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist - is going to go smash, and probably deserves to.

Real artists are not nice people. All their best feelings go into their work and life has the residue.