“The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.”

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”

“How can you care about the image of a landscape, when you show by your deeds that you don't care for the landscape itself?”

“The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.”

“No man is good enough to be another's master.”

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

“I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.”

“If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.”

“So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.”

“A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.”

“It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.”