All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.