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

Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of principle and distinction from the organization's leading positions, but toward the installation of men whose character and affiliations would as far as possible preclude any serious challenge to governmental sovereignty.

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.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

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

When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less." "Unless you love them.

In England, life is a long process of composing oneself.