Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

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

What we suffer, what we endure, what we muff, what we kill, what we miss, what we are guilty of, is done by us, as individuals, in private.

Hate does not present many choices; if hate is your solution, you are fairly certain to hate all phemonena with equal joy and intensity, without troubling to drag into prominence any one feature from the loathsome whole.

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.

Intellectuals range through the finest gradations of kind and quality: from those who are merely educated neurotics, usually with strong hidden reactionary tendencies, through mediocrities of all kinds, to men of real brains and sensibility, more or less stiffened into various respectabilities or substitutes for respectability. The number of Ignorant Specialists is large. The number of hysterics and compulsives is also large.

Perhaps this very instant is your time.