One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up.

The goal is the same: life itself; and the price is the same; life itself.

The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.

You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.

The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual reality. (On photographs by Helen Levitt)

Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?

Some people get where they hope to in this world. Most of us don't.

You've got to bear it in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or any regard for justice.

I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.

A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.

The camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time.

There are two times in a person's life when there is the possibility of pure happiness: in youth and in summer.

My swimming cap was really sprouting leaks these days. The thing is, you could patch over the holes, but it would never be the same. Like my love life.

It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it.

Soar, eat ether, see what has never been seen; depart, be lost, but climb.

Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.

I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.

The self cannot be self without other selves.

For 86 years I have served Jesus Christ and he has never abandoned me. How could I curse my blessed king and savior?

The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy, which is as much a goal of effort as a noble philosophy, an august civil polity or a great art.

Women always think that if they tell a man not to be pompous that will shut him up, but I am an old hand at that game. I know that if a man bides his time his moment will come.