“In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.”

“I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.”

“Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.”

“One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.”

“I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems”

“The breath that sharpens life is life itself.”

“Life is slow dying.”