“As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.”

There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.

We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.

Every fairy child may keep Two strong ponies and ten sheep; All have houses, each his own, Built of brick or granite stone; They live on cherries, they run wild I’d love to be a Fairy’s child.

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.

For I now realize that what overcame me that evening was a sudden awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer.

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.

One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.

Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.

Never use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an ‘audience’. They’re talking to a single person all the time.

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.

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

If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.

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.

When I’m killed, don’t think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there’s one thing that I know well, I’m damned if I’ll be damned to Hell!

I have no shortage of material or offers, it’s just a case of what you select to do. But I think it’s realistic that my chances of playing Romeo are now over.

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is staggering.

Generally, achieving goals… which in many cases means winning… is really the ultimate in this life we live in.

We rest our case on the production numbers.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

I was a basket case, you know? When I got mad, I threw clubs, you know? And if things weren’t going well.

In the case of the environment, there’s no one to bail it out.