Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

I wasn't convinced a shop girl would know the word 'Oedipal.

Italians are never punctual; the café, the convenient place to wait, absolves them from that. There is no question of hanging about, no looking lost and unwanted or even disreputable, as there is in hotel lobbies or the foyers of restaurants. One just sits and enjoys the scene, and waits.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

Marriage is like democracy - it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with.