Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.

If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Art never improves, but… the material of art is never quite the same.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.

The Nobel is a ticket to one’s own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.