Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

The Expulsion from Eden is an act of vindictive womanish spite; the Fall of Man, as recounted in the Bible, comes nearer to the Fall of God.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious retreat of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.

Boys do not grow up gradually. They move forward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations.