We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.

One reads for oneself and for strangers.

Originality must compound with inheritance.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden

What common people call beauty is essentially nature. The moment nature abandons you, your beauty is lost forever.

I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for the day.

It is with a word as with an arrow--once let it loose and it does not return.

How embarrassing for man to be the greatest miracle on earth and not to understand it!

Actually, I wear the nail polish to hide how grubby my nails are.

By that time I was thinking a little about pro ball and hopeful that someone would draft me.

Sonny Liston is great. But he'll fall in eight.

Conning the conmen is one of life’s most satisfying pleasures.

The day before yesterday has always been a day of glamor, of gilt and glory. The present is sordid and prosaic. Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe.