Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.

The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.

We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.

There is a curious law of art... that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination.

To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.