4 Lionel Trilling Quotes on Art

Lionel Trilling quotes on art

2. It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

11. After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain.

18. We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself - he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life.

24. The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.