The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.

Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.