“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.”

“I love a ballad but even too well if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably.”

“If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue.”

“The object of Art is to give life a shape.”

“When you get a thing the way you want it, leave it alone.”

“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job”

“A very little little let us doAnd all is done.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing.”

“Science finds it methods.”

“Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.”