One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American -- on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.

All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.

...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.