Quotes

====The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. ====
 * [|F. Scott Fitzgerald], "Handle With Care", Esquire Magazine (March 1936).

Aldous Huxley on essays...
===="Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay’s three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. Their art consists in setting forth, passing judgment upon, and drawing general conclusions from, the relevant data. In a third group we find those essayists who do their work in the world of high abstractions, who never condescend to be personal and who hardly deign to take notice of the particular facts, from which their generalizations were originally drawn." ====

== “Criticism is a serious intellectual act. It tries to evaluate serious works of art and to place them in the context of what has been done before in that medium or by that artists. This doesn’t mean that critics must limit themselves to work that aims high; they may select some commercial product like LA Law to make a point about American society and values. But on the whole they don’t waste their time on peddlers. They see themselves as scholars and what interests them is the play of ideas in their field.” ==  William Zinsser