The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.

The self is no mystery, the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

Things explain each other, not themselves.

It is necessary to study these words you have written, for the words have a longer history than you have and say more than you know.

There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art.

The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.

A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule.

[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.

She was destroyed many years ago, La Belle, on the cobblestones of the alley beside the opera house ...

O sleep O gentle sleep Nature's soft nurse.

Much of what happens in Love Always is really from overheard conversations in the Russian Tea Room. It's an improvisation of the way certain Hollywood agents think and talk to each other.

Fear and stress - one creates the other.

The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.

But success and failure are not true opposites, and they're not even in the same class. I mean, they're not even a couch and a chair.

Please, trust me, I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.

I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom.

How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.