A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

Sociology, the guilty science, functions best by alarm.

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.

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.

But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a feuilleton of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall.

'Ms.' is a syllable which sounds like a bumble bee is breaking wind.

It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.