I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.