Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.

A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.

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.

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun.

The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.