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 dark, uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.

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.

The climate of our culture is changing. Under these new rains, new suns, small things grow great, and what was great grows small; whole species disappear and are replaced.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politicians stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.

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.