“No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.

The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

Use the smallest word that does the job.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider’s web?

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.

A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

The best writing is rewriting.