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.

Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

... one doesn't really profit from experience; one merely learns to predict the next mistake.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

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

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