How far does one combine resistance to over-control with social justice, i.e. tolerable living for people in general? We are too selfish to be trusted, if left free, to give away enough to make people comfortable enough to give them a chance. Yet if all this is ordered for us, as to some extent it has to be, it so soon leads to tyranny. It is a very difficult problem. If only human beings had more pity, unselfishness, and justice and didn't need coercion to treat each other decently.

The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.

It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.

Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.

To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being. ... The open mind is the empty mind.

I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.