The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

There is no beginning to an end / But there is a beginning and an end / To beginning.

There is no passion more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs.... The time comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one's own particular climate. If it were one's last penny it would be used for that return passage.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.

You can either buy clothes or buy pictures.

I have been the creative literary mind of the century.