Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.

Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.

It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.

At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.