Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.

Life and death have been lacking in my life.