When ... I comprehended that poetry had no provision in it for ultimate practical attainment of the rightness of work that is truth, but led on ever only to a temporizing less- than-truth ... I stopped.

Women are strangers in the country of man.

Evil I had never found satisfactorily placeable as an integral element of the universal, or total, content of existence. Indeed, evil is evil just because there is no logical place for it, no room in reality for it. It is unreal, and yet real as something unreal.

Women, ever since there have been women, have had a way of being people.

Conversation succeeds conversation, Until there's nothing left to talk about Except truth, the perennial monologue, And no talker to dispute it but itself.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth…but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.