"I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world."
"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."
Oscar Wilde on Poetry"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."
Oscar Wilde on Poetry"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."
T. S. Eliot on Poetry"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."
Robert Frost on Poetry"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
Robert Frost on Poetry"Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them."
"In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved."
"Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were."
"Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev."
"Listen once in a while. It's amazing what you can hear."