“...Tolstoy's characters seem to come forward to meet you, very conscious of the impression they are making on one another and on the reader.”

“Paul Valery speaks of the 'une ligne donnee' of a poem. One line is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover for himself.”

“All that you can imagine you already know”

“Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother / With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.”

“I think continually of those who were truly great...Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with their honor.”

“I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.”

“Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.”