The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.

For I now realize that what overcame me that evening was a sudden awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer.

You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.