It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it - and I do and always have - then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people.

making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power of speech) is an enriching state for a writer. Then the written word ... takes on an intensity of its own. Nothing gets exteriorized or dissipated; all is concentrated within.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.