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

Madness might sometimes give access to a kind of knowledge. But was not a guarantee.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

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

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

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