You've got to love what's lovable, and hate what's hateable. It takes brains to see the difference.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

Style is less the man than the way a man takes himself.

One aged man - one man - can't fill a house.

The difference between a man and his valet: they both smoke the same cigars, but only one pays for them.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.