Take The Time To Write. You Can

Everybody Has A Different Idea Of When Those Good Old Days Were, But Everyone Is Convinced That There Was A Time When Literature Really Mattered And That It Doesn't Now. They Also Tend To Believe That It Really Matters Someplace Else - In Very Improbable Places Often. Russia Is Someone's Idea Of A Place Where Literature Really Counts.

I Suppose There's Something To Be Said For The Sheer Reinforcement Of Our Beliefs, But Really I Think Poetry Is More Useful As Disenchantment Than Enchantment.

If We Want To Have A Two-class Society And An Unemployed, Welfare-crippled Lower Class That Has No Access To Equality And Educational Opportunity And No Access To Jobs And Is Resentful And Furiously Angry, We Can Have It - That's What We've Been Willing To Pay For So Far.

All The New Thinking Is About Loss. In This It Resembles All The Old Thinking

[osip] Mandelstam, Who Wasn't A Political Thinker, Loved The Idea Of The City-state. One Of The Emblems In His Poetry Of The Politics He Imagined, Over And Against The Universalizing Politics Of [carl] Marx, Was The Medieval City Of Novgorod, Which Had In Its Center A Public Well Where The Water Was Free To Everyone. That Became For Him A Figure Of Justice.