I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty... but I am too busy thinking about myself.

Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.

Isn't it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality.

What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.

One's own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable.

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.