It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.

When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject.

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.