I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.

The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.

It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.

An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.

In the West you have every opportunity for civilization to triumph.