Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?

It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.