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.

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.

Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.