You shouldn't side-step suffering if you have to go through it to get where you're going.

Untrained minds have always been a nuisance to the military police of orthodoxy. God-intoxicated mystics and untidy saints with only a white blaze of divine love where their minds should have been, are perpetually creating almost as much disorder within the law as outside it.

No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

I think joy is just as instructive as pain, and I like it better. I never meant to suffer any more than I could help; my nature was meant for happiness, a daylight art and living.

advance money is really a delusion, that is to say, I get no more until it is paid out in sales, but still, living from hand to mouth and day to day as I do, a nickel in the hand is more useful than the same nickel next year. What do I know about next year? I've never been there. I don't know any one who has.

The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.

The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.