For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.

The best luck always happens to people who don't need it.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.