All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?

Now is the age of anxiety.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.

It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.