We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.

All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.

The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.

So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.