“When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.”

“Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”

“Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.”

“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”

“It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”

“Art is born of humiliation.”

“We are all here on earth to help others what on earth the others are here for I don't know. ”

“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.”

“Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.”

“In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.”

“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”