“We are most alive when we're in love.”

“Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.”

“I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.”

“There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.”

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

“...and then, in dreaming, / The clouds methought would open and show riches / Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked / I cried to dream again.”

“O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you. . . . She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the forefinger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomi Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep.”

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.”

“I have supped full with horrors.”

“Some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time.”

“To wilful men, the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmasters.”

“I can hardly forbear hurling things at him.”

“These cardinals trifle with me; I abhor; This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome.”

“A very little thief of occasion will rob you of a great deal of patience.”

“Playing golf is like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture.”

“Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an ever smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose”

“Golf. Trying to knock a tiny ball into an even smaller hole with implements ill suited to the purpose.”

“O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you. . . . She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the forefinger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomi Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep.”

“Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.”

“In the night, imagining some fear,How easy is a bush supposed a bear!”