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...