The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.