Two evils, monstrous either one apart, Possessed me, and were long and loath at going: A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart, And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels.

In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roastbeef and potato. A better man was Aristotle, Pulling steady on the bottle.

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.

It is a miracle of harmony, of the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward necessity of things.

For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances, until we manage to keep quiet the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.

The curse of imagination is picturing the world as it should be.

A hostage?""They used the word slave, but isnt' it the same thing? Isn't that what you'd call it if someone stole me and put me in a house and wouldn't let me leave? Isn't it?

I think it's interesting being American, the expectations for an American guy, and the image that has to be projected. 'Oh, I can't wear pink,' that kind of stuff. There's none of that in Europe.

I think Donald Trump's natural tendency in all things is to resist any "deal" where he doesn't get to set the terms.

We will kill in ourselves a world in order to build another, a higher one reaching to the heavens.

Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.

People who fail to accumulate money, without exception, have the habit of reaching decisions, if at all, very slowly, and of changing these decisions quickly and often.

The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.

This is what everybody's forgetting about [Barak] Obama and his immigration law and his executive action and his amnesty on it, the Supreme Court decision. Immigration law is settled.

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.