Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep.

You have to fall in love with hanging around words.

Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.

Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.