By the time I was eleven years old, I had been taught that nature, far from abhorring a Vacuum, positively adores it.

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.

The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

it is as unseeing to ask what is the use of poetry as it would be to ask what is the use of religion.

The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves.

All great art contains an element of the irrational.

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