A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.

Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.

I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.

I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.

You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.

To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.

I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.

I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.

I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends.

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds.

I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

Love your neighbor as yourself; but don't take down the fence.

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.

I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.

Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.

I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.

Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.

I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.

Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.