Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Pres: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable.

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He's convinced that the last, the most s…

My verse forms are relatively traditional (traditions alter). In general they have moved away from strict classical patterns in the direction of greater freedo…

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, ha…

They [the Greeks] were the first Westerners; the spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become…