Lionel Trilling
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"Lionel Mordecai Trilling"

was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has been a subject of continued interest.

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

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.