Art like life is an open secret.

What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.

All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.

Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.