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

In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

History is all explained by geography.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.

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.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.