Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is...

We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word ”Intellectual” suggests straight away. A man who’s untrue to his wife.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a...

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be...

A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the...

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.

see without looking, . . . hear without listening, . . . breathe without asking.

The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks,...

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a...

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...

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.

Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.

What people don’t realize is that intimacy has its conventions as well as ordinary social intercourse. There are three cardinal rules — don’t take somebody else’s boyfriend unless you’ve been specifically invited to do so,...

As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual...

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

No hero is immortal till he dies.

May it not be that, just as we have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that faith...

”Healing,” Papa would tell me, ”is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”

It is… axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the...

The only way to spend New Year’s Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must...

No hero is mortal till he dies.

Art is born of humiliation.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

No good opera plot can be sensible:… people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.