“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.”

“In winter's tedious nights sit by the fire With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales Of woeful ages, long ago betid”

“Her father lov'd me; oft invited me;Still question'd me the story of my life,From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,That I have pass'd.”

“Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.”

“Time, that takes survey of all the world,Must have a stop.”

“The setting sun, and the music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, Writ in rememberance more than long things past.”

“Finish, good lady; the bright day is done, And we are for the Dark.”

“How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

“The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and for years around it.”

“A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.”

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty look, repeats his words, Remembers me of his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form”

“Remember thee!Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seatIn this distracted globe.”

“My rage is gone,And I am struck with sorrow. Take him up.Help, three o' th' chiefest soldiers; I'll be one.Beat thou the drum, that it speaks mournfully,Trail your steel spikes. Though in this city heHath widowed and unchilded many a one,Which to this hour bewail the injury,Yet he shall have a noble memory.Assist.”

“Write till your ink be dry, and with your tearsMoist it again, and frame some feeling lineThat may discover such integrity.”

“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.”

“My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.”