When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.

We are suffering from too much sarcasm.

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.

Superior people never make long visits.

Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt.

It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.

It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief.

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

There never was a war that was not inward.

My father used to say superior people never make long visits.

Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage.

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

Originality is a by product of sincerity.

They fought the enemy we fight fat living and self pity. Shine o shine unfalsifying sun on this sick scene.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence not in silence but restraint.

The Heart That Gives Gathers.

Originality is a by product of sincerity

Revision is its own reward.

Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.