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A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Poetry is life distilled.

Touched by poetry, language is more fully language and at the same time is no longer language: it is a poem.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It’s concentrated, you carry it around with you, and it nourishes you when you need it.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

A poem is less a thing than any other work of art.

A poem is less a thing than any other work of art.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains Which only poets know.

Passion makes the best observations and draws the most wretched conclusions.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife, who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Or perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of the duck unserved.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

When you’re a novelist, you’re writing a play but you’re acting all the parts, you’re controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it’s your show.

When you’re a novelist, you’re writing a play but you’re acting all the parts, you’re controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it’s your show.

How many of us have been incited to reason, have first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life by some dazzling aphorism.

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.