“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.”

“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.”

“Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is! (Act 1, scene 1)”

“This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.”

“It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.”

“O, how full of briers is this working-day world!”

“O time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me t'untie.”

“It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.”

“Light boats sail swift, though greater hulks draw deep.”

“No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take upon's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon.”

“More matter with less art.”