Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.

Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.

Without courage, all other virtues are useless.

I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.

Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.

It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.

Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.