Playwriting gets into your blood and you can’t stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

And would it have been worth it, after all,Would it have been worth while,After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along...

T.S. Eliot deems dangerous the tendency “to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having...

Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.His name, as I ought to have told you before,Is really Asparagus. That’s such a fussTo pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.His coat’s very shabby, he’s...

The highest form of treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Murder in the Cathedral

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought...

When one wanted one’s interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people’s tricks.

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity

The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows, Are proud and implacable, passionate foes;It is always the same, wherever one goes.And the Pugs and the Poms, although most people saythat they do not like fighting, will...

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?I shall wear white flannel trousers, and...

And indeed there will be time/ To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”/ Time to turn back and descend the stair,/ With a bald spot in the middle of my hair. . ./...

Time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Do I dare Disturb the universe?

Time past and time futureWhat might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always present.” (Four Quartets)

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent Godless people:Their only monument the asphalt roadAnd a thousand lost golf balls.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?When I count, there are only you and I togetherBut when I look ahead up the white roadThere is always another one walking beside youGliding wrapt in...

The world turns and the world changes,But one thing does not change.In all of my years, one thing does not change,However you disguise it, this thing does not change:The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

He’s outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard’s.And when the larder’s looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,Or when the milk is missing, or...

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.

To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the bottle. It is to start a new train of events that is beyond your control…

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.

Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

No I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be Am an attendant lord one that will do To swell a progress start a scene or two Advise the prince no doubt an easy...

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter / And on her daughter / They wash their feet in soda water.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry –That is a life.

[Henry] James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a...

But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent...

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard spots.

We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.

It ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

The Nobel is a ticket to one’s own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

The one thing you can do is to do nothing. Wait . . . You will find that you survive humiliation and hat’s an experience of incalculable value.