What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.

If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

She may be lying in bed reading a book, she may be making love with a prize fighter, or she may be running like mad through a field of stubble, one shoe one, one shoe off, a man named Corn Cob pursuing her hotly. Wherever she is I am standing in complete darkness; her absence blots me out.

The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life... Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to - and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for - myself.

The only law which is really lived up to wholeheartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity.