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“Put crudely, one is left with a choice between two unsatisfactory combinations: artistic integrity married to spiritual compromise; and spiritual integrity married to artistic banality-or, worse, art compromised on both counts. Neither one will satisfy those who recognize the fundamental necessity of integrity in both faith and art.”

“I was at Mount Tamalpais near San Francisco hiking when a boulder came hurling down the mountainside and smashed my left hand. When I looked at my mangled bloody fingers, I had a strange reaction. 'Thank God I will never have to play again,' I said. The fact is that dedication to one's art does involve a sort of enslavement.”

“In the past, heartland whites with some kind of dream or desire left their towns for cities to become citified. They wanted to get away from religion, from their families, they wanted to come out, make art, have sex, have experiences. But this new crew was something we had never seen before. They were the first generation of suburban Americans. They came, not to be citified, but rather to change cities into places they could recognize and dominate.”

“Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion - to say nothing of the shape of his sentences - are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.”

“In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.”

“Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it - Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism.”

“Art that means anything in the life of a community must bear some relation to current interpretations of the mystery of the universe. Our rigid separation of the humanities and the sciences has temporarily left our art stranded or stammering and incoherent. Both art and science ought to be blended in our early education of our children's emotions and powers of observation, and that harmony carried forward in later education.”

“No age can have everthing and in material ways ours is more fortunate than any preceding one. Our ancestors appear to have mastered the art of living better than we are able to when an easy conscience, largely due to the unshaken faith of the time, left a marging of spiritual energy with which to enjoy life.”

“Do anything but love; or if thou lovest and art a woman, hide thy love from him whom thou dost worship; never let him know how dear he is; flit like a bird before him; lead him from tree to tree, from flower to flower; but be not won, or thou wilt, like that bird, when caught and caged, be left to pine neglected and perish in forgetfulness.”

“Why dost thou heap up wealth, which thou must quit, Or what is worse, be left by it? Why dost thou load thyself when thou 'rt to fly, Oh, man! ordain'd to die? Why dost thou build up stately rooms on high, Thou who art under ground to lie? Thou sow'st and plantest, but no fruit must see, For death, alas! is reaping thee.”

“All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnessess and concavities, through hollows and over peaks - feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and the hollow, the thrust and the contour.”

“The art of invective resembles the art of boxing. Very few fights are won with the straight left. It is too obvious, and it can betoo easily countered. The best punches, like the best pieces of invective in this style, are either short-arm jabs, unexpectedly rapid and deadly; or else one-two blows, where you prepare your opponent with the first hit, and then, as his face comes forward, connect with your other fist: one, two. Both are effective; but they can be administered only by a real artist, with a real wish to knock his enemy out.”

“The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes--McCarthy and Stalin--that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.”

“There is plenty of room left for exact experiment in art, and the gate has been opened for some time. What had been accomplished in music by the end of the eighteenth century has only begun in the fine arts. Mathematics and physics have given us a clue in the form of rules to be strictly observed or departed from, as the case may be. Here salutary discipline is come to grips first of all with the function of forms, and not with form as the final result … in this way we learn how to look beyond the surface and get to the root of things.”

“Home schoolers do not wish to force other parents to home school. Gun owners do not insist that others buy guns, or that hunting be promoted as an alternative lifestyle. It is not the National Rifle Association out lobbying to have government schools read books entitled 'Heather Has Two Hunters' to preschoolers. It is, in fact, the Left that now strives to use state power to impose its morality by forcing all taxpayers to pay for abortions and public "art" that mocks people of faith. It is the Left that forces parents to pay for government schools where they do not wish to send their children.”

“Emile Saint-Blague had been a lively, versatile painter in his youth, but he had abused his energy by painting too many pictures; so that in what might have been the ripe period of his art he had nothing left but ideas. A man who has nothing left but ideas may be of great service to his friends, but he is of no use at all to himself. Emile was certainly an inspiration to his friends.”