You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.

In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.

The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.