“ Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.”

“Art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.”

“The failure in reading -the omnipresent verbalism- of those who have not been trained in the arts of grammar and logic shows how lack of such discipline results in slavery to words rather than mastery of them.”

“Normal people do not create art.”

“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”

“I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet about the chaste sweetness of her face and the intuitive goodness shining in her walk. But now I think -- it might have been better, might it not, to have held on to the desire to be a Poet?”