Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.

Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!

No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!

It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.