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