When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

We think about sex obsessively except during the act, when our minds tend to wander.

Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.