A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

We live in the time of the colossal upright oblong.

I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.

We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.

Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.