“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.”

“Nor age so eat up my invention.”

“Ideas are the very coinage of your brain.”

“Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long / To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?”

“My endeavorsHave ever come too short of my desires.Yet filed with my abilities.”

“To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first.”

“...lest too light winning make the prize light.”

“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.”

“Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”

“When workmen strive to do better than well, they do confound their skill in covetousness.”

“The man who never makes a mistake must get tired of doing nothing.”

“"Fair, kind, and true" is all my argument,"Fair, kind, and true" varying to other words;And in this change is my invention spent,Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.”

“Shall I compare thee to a summer day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate... When in eternal lines to time thou growst So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

“The truest poetry is the most feigning.”