Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust itsvitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile.

Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversations.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

The pain of loss, moreover, however agonizing, however haunting in memory, quiets imperceptibly into acceptance as the currents of active living and of fresh emotions flow over it.

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

[On newspapers:] A first draft of history.

Democracy, like any non-coercive relationship, rests on a shared understanding of limits.

The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and mangled mind leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

Money buys access access buys influence.

The world is not run by thought, nor by imagination, but by opinion.

It takes two to write a letter as much as it takes two to make a quarrel.