A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.

Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbor.

The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.

They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.

Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.

You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.