Quote collection
109 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet."
"Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation."
"Language and, presumably, literature are more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature toward the state is essentially the reaction of the permanent-better yet, the infinite-against the temporary, against the finite."
"...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft."
"I'm not trying to be ridiculous or funny, but it was rather pleasant to find yourself in isolation, in solitary."
"An object, after all, is what makes infinity private."
"The Constitution doesn't mention rain."
"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production."
"Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations."
"I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process."
"It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then."
"All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend."
"My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego."
"It's partly the fault of the institutions of education. But it's partly the decision to be relieved of responsibility. Literature is simply the most focused form of the demands on the evolution of the species. It imposes a certain responsibility, moral, ethical and esthetic responsibility, and the species simply doesn't want to oblige."
"I'm neither Catholic not Protestant. Protestant sounds good but I don't think I am."
"In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony."
"I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move."
"As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history."
"I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing."
"When Thomas Mann arrived in California from Germany, they asked him about German literature. And he said, 'German literature is where I am.' It's really a bit grand, but if a German can afford it, I can afford it."