“no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.”

“Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a se...”

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still ...”

“A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adoles...”

“He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietz”

“Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“You're the ruler of the universe. Try to show a little taste!”

“It's not that our family has no taste, it's just that our family's taste is inconsistent.”

“Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste and amuses himself by applying it triumphantly wherever he travels.”