If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.

If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart, the fires which keep the poet alive as the citizen never lives, but which burn all the roofs of security!

One didn’t really believe till one saw it demonstrated that giving oneself up completely to art, to emotion, to enjoyment, without planning for the future or counting the cost, produced dreadful disabilities and bankruptcies later.

I really can’t stand any more to pay for a burst of animation when someone comes in for drinks with a depressed and low-keyed next day, in which I have to go around on my hands and knees.

From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation.

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations – like that of artistic imagination.

If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations -- like that of artistic imagination.

A young poet in America should not be advised at the outset to give up all for the Muse-to seclude himself in the country, to live hand from mouth in Greenwich Village or to escape to the Riviera. I should not advise him even to become a magazine editor or work in a publisher's office. The poet would do better to study a profession, to become a banker or a public official or even to go in for the movies.

In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.