"A remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good in spite of all the people who say he is very good."

"Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers."

"I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horror of sordid passion and-if he is lucky enough-know the love of an honest woman."

"I was last in Rome in AD 540 when it was full of Goths and their heavy horses. It has changed a great deal since then."

"Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer."

"Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else."

"Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued."

"Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings."

"Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat."

"What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love."