It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights; at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.

All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.

Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.

I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.