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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
Choice of attention – to pay attention to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.