I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any – after all, most people are unhappy, don’t you think?
What will survive of us is love.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.
I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.
They say eyes clear with age.
You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Picasso.
And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock...
I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.
Men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet. These I have tried to remind of the excitement of jazz and tell where it may still be found.
Only the young can be alone freely. The time is shorter now for company, And sitting by a lamp more often brings Not peace, but other things.
A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.
What one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, the kind of environment one has had and has now. One doesn’t really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or one can write.
I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way – making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.
The sight of the money depressed her, because in such small familiar things the foreign country around her was best expressed.