Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

True villains are extremely photogenic.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.