Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.