Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.

Next to possessing genius one's self is the power of appreciating it in others.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

[On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.

I try never to let my schooling get in the way of my education.

I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.