Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.

Divorce transforms habit into drama.

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.

No man kills himself unless there is something wrong with his life.

In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.