One didn't really believe till one saw it demonstrated that giving oneself up completely to art, to emotion, to enjoyment, without planning for the future or counting the cost, produced dreadful disabilities and bankruptcies later.

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

On the one hand, I have wanted to supply documentation on myself by including material relevant to my emotions and ideas in my youth; and, on the other, not to let myself down by publishing inferior material. My poetry comes under the latter head. My only advice to the reader is to skip any verse that he sees coming.

The great mistake about Europe is taking the countries seriously and letting them quarrel and drop bombs on one another.

They [the English] have a special word, "civil," for what is elsewhere merely ordinary politeness.

At 60 the sexual preoccupation, when it hits you, seems sometimes sharper, as if it were an elderly malady, like gout.

No two persons ever read the same book.