Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.

A poem should not mean but be.

Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.

The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.