Quotes

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

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

I do not approve the extermination of the enemy; the policy of exterminating or, as it is barbarously said, liquidating enemies is one of the most alarming developments of modern war and peace, from the point of view of those who desire the survival of culture. One needs the enemy.

It was I who introduced my wife to The Marx Brothers films and she is now as keen a fan as I am.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

[in 1945] A poet must take as his material his own language as it is actually spoken around him.

The kind of poetry that I needed, to teach me the use of my own voice, did not exist in English at all; it was only found in French.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to escape from these things.

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

Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences; or, if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument.

The journey, not the arrival.

Mankind cannot bear very much reality.

Only those willing to go too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

And I Teresius have foresuffered all enacted on that divan or bed. I who sat by Thebes below the wall and walked amongst the lowest of the Dead.

These fragments have I shored against my ruin.

Musing on the King my Brother's wreck, and the King my Father's wreck before him.

[TV] I find only anxiety and apprehension about the social effects of this past time and especially about its effect upon small children

I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

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

Life is very long.