“Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.”

One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

Our own consciousness is incapable of having produce the universe. God, therefore, exists. That is to say, there is no reason for not applying the term God, Theos, to the intimate essence.

What matters most is not the idea, but the capacity to believe in it completely.

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

The what is so much more important than how.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

In verse one can take any damn constant one likes, one can alliterate, or assone, or rhyme, or quant, or smack, only one MUST leave the other elements irregular.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.

I was a little excited but mostly blorft. “Blorft” is an adjective I just made up that means ‘Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.’ I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.

Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

Cuisine has become too complicated – this is about subject, verb, adjective: duck, turnips, sauce.

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.

The adjective ‘decent’ and the noun ‘government’ have seldom come together in the human history!

Diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.