The standard dreaming of a society has to be listened to.

The young show the genetic process, the old merely die of it.

Every art is a church without communicants, presided over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.

Balance is compromise. Of the muscles.

It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

perhaps there's no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.

Speech isn't for agony.