... politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.

But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry. ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.

All art, in spite of the struggles of some critics to prove otherwise, is based on emotion and projects emotion.

... how much of our inner substance is it good for us to give to public griefs? The whole modern tendency to agonize over the suffering of the entire globe is surely something new.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

I have lost faith in universal panaceas - work is the one thing in which I really believe.

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.