When you make a bet, you're saying something.

Divorce transforms habit into drama.

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

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

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

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul - his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

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.