It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

A correct answer is like an affectionate kiss, Goethe said; a correct answer, Gertrude would have said, is like a slap in the face.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

The safest way to avoid the world is through art; and the safest way to be linked to the world is through art.

We died like aunts of pets or foreigners.

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.