One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.

We have reason to be afraid. This is a terrible place.

Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.

So if I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature.

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.