“Men go after me, and I choose among them.”

All the praise I received couldn’t substitute for the praise I had never received from my mother at home.

I never like other people to clean for me. I don’t want them to invade my own privacy.

To fall in love is awfully simple, but to fall out of love is simply awful.

Everybody asks me, ‘So, what are you doing now?’ Why must I be doing something? All my life I’ve been doing something.

I’m not conniving – that has a pejorative context. I’m not sitting in back rooms making deals. That’s not my style.

You can’t be beautiful and hate because hate is a corroding disease and affects the way you look. … You can’t hide it – ever. It shows in your eyes. It warps your expression. It affects your character, your personality.

All my life I’ve been doing. For now, I’m being — being quiet, being grateful.

I’ve lived through a lifetime of crises and survived.

Even when I jog, I need a place to get to.

You’ve got to love people, places, ideas; you’ve got to live with mind, body, soul; you’ve got to be committed; there is no life on the side-lines.

There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.

Two hundred million Americans, and there ain’t two good catchers among ’em.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.

We moralize among ruins.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination’, we might say – exercised through the mass media.

The pond-lily is a star and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expeditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where she rocks upon the dark.

I used to say, “Go boldly in among the English,” and then I used to go boldly in myself.

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.