The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.

The man who attracts luck carries with him the magnet of preparation.

What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.

There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

We are all citizens of history.

The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.