If Wishes Were Stories, Beggars Would Read.

Our Universities Should Produce Good Criticism; They Do Not Or, At Best, They Do So Only As Federal Prisons Produce Counterfeit Money: A Few Hardened Prisoners Are More Or Less Surreptitiously Continuing Their Real Vocations.

One Of The Most Puzzling Things About A Novel Is That "the Way It Really Was" Half The Time Is, And Half The Time Isn't, The Way It Ought To Be In The Novel.

It Is Always Hard For Poets To Believe That One Says Their Poems Are Bad Not Because One Is A Fiend But Because Their Poems Are Bad.

A Person Is A Process, One That Leads To Death.

When You Begin To Read A Poem You Are Entering A Foreign Country Whose Laws And Language And Life Are A Kind Of Translation Of Your Own; But To Accept It Because Its Stews Taste Exactly Like Your Old Mother's Hash, Or To Reject It Because The Owl-headed Goddess Of Wisdom In Its Temple Is Fatter Than The Statue Of Liberty, Is An Equal Mark Of That Want Of Imagination, That Inaccessibility To Experience, Of Which Each Of Us Who Dies A Natural Death Will Die.