Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.

There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ''Did you get an erection?'' If the answer is ''Yes'' from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

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.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.