He whose first emotion, on the view of an excellent work, is to undervalue or depreciate it, will never have one of his own to show.

I think it's very useful to be insulated from your surrounds, because it gives you your inviolate privacy, without pressures, so that you can just be yourself.

I'm afraid I wasn't much of a student, but my casual reading was enormous.

I really don't know enough about the structure of fiction.

I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry.

Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing.

I think that what's happening today, with all the young poets rushing from one college to another, lecturing at the drop of a hat and so on, is not too good; I think it might have a bad effect on a great many of the young poets. They - to quote Mark Twain - "swap juices" a little too much, so that they are in danger of losing their own identity and don't give themselves time enough in which to work out what's really of importance to them - they're too busy.