Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
— T. S. Eliot
The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
You are the music while the music lasts.
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
Home is where one starts from.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
