Let’s not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
The naming of cats is a difficult matter. It isn’t just one of your holiday games. You may think at first I’m mad as a hatter. When I tell you a cat must have three different names...
It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky.
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.
If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.
The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.
Do I dare disturb the universe?
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.
Every moment is a fresh beginning.
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.