The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn’t deserve it, give it to him anyhow.
Boys are the cash of war.
Conviction is possible only in a world more primitive than ours can be perceived to be. A man can achieve a simply gnomic conviction only by ignoring the radical describers of his environment, or by hating them, as convinced men have hated, say, Darwin and Freud, as agents of some devil.
Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.
A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.
Nothing goes further toward a man’s liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.
Written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar.
The public library is the most dangerous place in town.
I’m smiled out, talked out, quipped out, socialized so far from any being, I need the weight of mortal silences to get realized back into myself.
I have one head that wants to be good, And one that wants to be bad. And always, as soon as I get up, One of my heads is sad.
Boys are the cash of war. Whoever said: we’re not free spenders- doesn’t know our like.
It is easy enough to praise men for the courage of their conviction. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the courage of their convictions.
The thing about cats as you might find, is that no one knows what they have in mind.
General rules have been legislated into being by past masters.
To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.
Patience is the art of caring slowly.
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.
The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.
Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.