There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow.
The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
It’s usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond.
All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.
I’m always amazed at the American practice of allowing one party to a homosexual act to remain passive – it’s so undemocratic. Sexmust be mutual.
A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.
The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.
Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
To be free is often to be lonely.
Life is a picnic on a precipice.
The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.
God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however “good” I may become, remains unchanged.
A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.
If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.