Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

Every writer and artist wonders what in the world people of other professions can find to live for.

We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

As Coleridge said, "We receive but what we give." The happy life is a life of continual generosity in which we go out to meet and acclaim the world.

Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the Gypsies.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.