A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.