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.