The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

Dirt's a funny thing,' the Boss said. 'Come to think of it, there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dirt too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?

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

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.