"Like gladiator games and pyramid building, opera has always been a gloriously money-losing proposition. It is the most extravagant of arts, requiring the constant support of kings, dictators, plutocrats, and town councils. Box-office success is no solution. San Francisco Opera loses money at every sold-out performance. Sane business practices simply don’t suffice. Composer Richard Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, was the ideal operatic angel — very rich and certifiably insane. Mel Brooks’ shyster producer Max Bialystock need not have mounted Springtime for Hitler to score a surefire loss. Aida would have done just fine."

“Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.”

“The schism between Christianity and the arts has had two profound consequences, two vast impoverishments--one for the arts world, the other for the Church. First, for the arts world, the loss of a transcendent religious vision, a refined and rigorous sense of the sacred, the breaking and discarding of the two thousand years of Christian mythos, symbolism, and tradition has left contemporary American art spiritually diminished. The shallow novelty, the low-cost nihilism, and the vague and sentimental spiritual pretensions of so much contemporary art—in every medium—are the legacy of this schism, as well as the cynicism that pervades the arts world” .”

“Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act. A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.”

“Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don't publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines' contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind — journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.”

““If Catholic Christianity does not offer a vision of existence that transcends the election cycle, if our redemption is social and our resurrection economic, then it’s time render everything up to Caesar.”

“Raw artistic talent is abundant. What is truly rare are the cultural circumstances, attitudes, and institutions to develop and perfect it. Few American cities have ever managed to foster a vibrant literary milieu of international significance — perhaps only Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. American literature has most often been an affair of isolated genius or small coterie.”