The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail |
The salvation of the world is in man's suffering |
The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies. |
The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business |
The work of the artist is to lift up peoples hearts and help them endure |
The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use. . . . |
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies. |
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. |
The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. |
There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't. |
There is no such thing as was -- only is. |
There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need. |
There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need. |
They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion -- not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own. |
This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them. |