I really can't stand any more to pay for a burst of animation when someone comes in for drinks with a depressed and low-keyed next day, in which I have to go around on my hands and knees.

Keep going; never stop; sit tight; Read something luminous at night.

I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.

The only thing that we can really make is our work, and deliberate work of the mind, imagination and hand, done, as Nietzsche said, ‘notwithstanding,’ in the long run remakes the world.

Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances.

A young poet in America should not be advised at the outset to give up all for the Muse-to seclude himself in the country, to live hand from mouth in Greenwich Village or to escape to the Riviera. I should not advise him even to become a magazine editor or work in a publisher's office. The poet would do better to study a profession, to become a banker or a public official or even to go in for the movies.

If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.