VN on sharpening pencils, Pnin:

"With the help of a janitor he screwed into the side of the desk a pencil sharpener—that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must."

Fairfield Porter on Greek sculpture:

"We all know that the Greeks took for granted the high value they placed on their sculpture. Such an unreasonable conviction of value is contagious, like the attraction exerted by a narcissistic person."

—Paolo Uccello, St. George and the Dragon 

 The absence of teeth in VN’s Pnin:

“It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.”

Fairfield Porter on painter John Marin:

“The largeness of his vision has something shy about it, a holding off; he does not touch things closely. The imprecision is only imprecision.”

—John Marin, Mt. Chocorua No. 1

“Discipline is sweetened by compromise.”

—Fairfield Porter

Lawrence Klepp on Art and the Renaissance:

“Great art…rarely appears in peaceful, pastoral societies, whether Switzerland, Lapland, or some tropical island paradise. It tends to turn up in wealthy, multifaceted, and tumultuous urban societies such as 15th-century northern Italy. Their usual accompaniment of high ambition, greed, steep social hierarchies, crimes of passion and calculation, and political and amorous intrigues provide either the subject matter for the art or the motivation to escape and transcend them through form, color, and harmony.”

Fairfield Porter on meaning in Art:

"Some art has a very open meaning, and can be written about in terms of this meaning; but the chances are that if the meaning is the most interesting thing about it, it does not stand alone, it does not assert itself. It leans on what it means. An implied meaning is richer."

"Our virtues lose themselves in selfishness as rivers are lost in the sea."

—La Rochefoucauld 

Fairfield Porter on non-objective, or "abstract" painting:

"Critics who find non-objectivity anti-traditional, do not see that tradition is a process. It leads to non-objectivity like this: first, acceptance of nature as including the artist, who is, like one of the details of his painting, an equal part of creation; next, a questioning of what things are, of what we see; then a questioning of how we see; from here to a consideration of vision itself; then to the one who sees, the artist as part of a duality of nature and recipient; to the artist in introspection, and a denial of objectivity."

Colin Fleming on Schumann's Violin Concerto in D Minor, lost for a hundred years; "[it breaks] through the black and the haze to touch the palms of angels."

Memory in V. Nabokov's Ada:

"It aggrieved him—that complete collapse of the past, the dispersal of its itinerant court and music-makers, the logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance."

Terry Teachout on the death of the love song.

Lee Wiley sings Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea:

Murray Ringold on ideology, in Philip Roth's I Married a Communist:

"...when you decide to contribute your personal problem to an ideology's agenda, everything that is personal is squeezed out and discarded and all that remains is what is useful to the ideology."

George Orwell on autobiography:

"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

Joseph Epstein on Speak, Memory.

Fairfield Porter on the meaning of Art, Art in its Own Terms:

"To ask the meaning of art is like asking the meaning of life: experience comes before a measurement against a value system. And the question whether art has any meaning, like the same question about life, may not be answerable at all. It can be answered by each person for himself, and it is doubtful how well this answer can be communicated. What counts is personal experience, and therefore, what the critic can do, in fact all he can do, is to describe his experience as sensitively as possible."

LE Sissman on working in an office:

"At its best the office is a place where your training and your ego get at least an intermittent chance to shine; where you work with others who, with luck, may include you in a team of motivated, purposeful people combining forces to achieve a goal; where you work for something more than survival alone. In that kind of office, your time is not wasted, your life is not frittered away in eight-hour segments; however trivial the product may be, you are actively furthering your life while earning a living."

Danny Heitman on the poet LE Sissman.

Anthony Paletta on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

"Those who understand the complexities of human nature know that joy and pain, ugliness and beauty, love and hate, mercy and cruelty and other conflicting emotions often blend and cannot be separated from each other. Thus I am able not only to make people turn away from the Creator, but to damage their own bodies, all in the name of some imaginary cause."

—Satan from IB Singer's The Destruction of Kreshev

"Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusuable."

—Paul Valery

"Photography is an art if the photographer loves it enough, and if the juror who selects the show responds."

—Fairfield Porter, "Art in its Own Terms"

There is no health; physicians say that we
at best enjoy but a neutrality.
And can there be worse sickness than to know
That we are never born well, nor can be so?
We are born ruinous...

—John Donne, "An Anatomy of the World"

"...the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes, that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teach the method; which method, like a waterfall splashing from rock to rock, ceases to be a medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future may become instrumental in evolving esoteric dialects—Basic Basque and so forth—spoken only by certain elaborate machines."

"His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence."

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

"The fact is a wire through which one sends a current."

—Saul Bellow

"The necessary premise is that a man is somehow more than the his 'characteristics,' all the emotions, strivings, tastes and constructions it pleases to call 'My Life.' We have ground to hope that a Life is something more than a such a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light."

—Saul Bellow, Herzog