I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.