Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.

There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.

Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.