The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

When people say of their tragedies, 'I don't often think of it now,' what they mean is it has entered permanently into their thoughts, and colors everything.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.