The constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

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

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.

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.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

Within a single scene, it seems to be unwise to have access to the inner reflections of more than one character. The reader generally needs a single character as the means of perception, as the character to whom the events are happening, as the character with whom he is to empathize in order to have the events of the writing happen to him.