[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

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.

Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.

This joy you feel is life.

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.

It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.