All great art contains an element of the irrational.

What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear.

What the reporters are like! They are mad with excitement at the thought of my approaching demise. Kind Sister Farquhar, my nurse, spends much of her time in throwing them downstairs. But one got in the other day, and asked me if I mind the fact that I must die.

Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.

White as a winding sheet, Masks blowing down the street: Moscow, Paris London, Vienna all are undone. The drums of death are mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, Mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, The world’s floors are quaking, crumbling and breaking.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

Tall windows show Infinity; And, hard reality, The candles weep and pry and dance Like lives mocked at by Chance. The rooms are vast as Sleep within; When once I ventured in, Chill Silence, like a surging sea, Slowly enveloped me.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, ‘Ordinary Piety’ and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed – it is, indeed, unavoidable.

In private life she was not in the least what her calumniators would have wished her to be. She was very quiet, had a great natural dignity, and was extremely intelligent. She was also exceedingly sensitive.

By the time I was eleven years old, I had been taught that nature, far from abhorring a Vacuum, positively adores it.

I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.

The poet is the complete lover of mankind.

The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of “a moment of their other lives” a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.

Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.

Still falls the rain – dark as the world of man, black as our loss – blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?

I’m dying, but otherwise I’m in very good health.

I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.

Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.

Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her ’a beautiful little knitter.

Winter is the time for comfort – it is the time for home.

Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.

I have never, in all my life, been so odious as to regard myself as ‘superior’ to any living being, human or animal. I just walked alone – as I have always walked alone.

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

One’s own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable.

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.

What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.

The child and the great artist – these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

I’m afraid I’m being an awful nuisance.

Another little drink wouldn’t do us any harm.

By ‘happiness’ I do not mean worldly success or outside approval, though it would be priggish to deny that both these things are most agreeable. I mean the inner consciousness, the inner conviction that one is doing well the thing that one is best fitted to do by nature.

All great art contains an element of the irrational.

When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.

Virginia Woolf’s writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

What the reporters are like! They are mad with excitement at the thought of my approaching demise. Kind Sister Farquhar, my nurse, spends much of her time in throwing them downstairs. But one got in the other day, and asked me if I mind the fact that I must die.

Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.

Tall windows show Infinity; And, hard reality, The candles weep and pry and dance Like lives mocked at by Chance. The rooms are vast as Sleep within; When once I ventured in, Chill Silence, like a surging sea, Slowly enveloped me.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, ‘Ordinary Piety’ and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed – it is, indeed, unavoidable.

In private life she was not in the least what her calumniators would have wished her to be. She was very quiet, had a great natural dignity, and was extremely intelligent. She was also exceedingly sensitive.

People are usually made Dames for virtues I do not possess.

I’m not the man to balk at a low smell, I not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don’t you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.

By the time I was eleven years old, I had been taught that nature, far from abhorring a Vacuum, positively adores it.

I am one of those unhappy persons who inspire bores to the greatest flights of art.

The poet is the complete lover of mankind.

The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of “a moment of their other lives” a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.

I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.