"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics."

"Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same."

"A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance."

"A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good."

"The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

"Home is where one starts from."

"I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different."

"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."

"There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him."

"Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself."

"Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment."

"Business today consists in persuading crowds."

"The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first."

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

"The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours."

"Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly."

"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."

"It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves."

"Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express."

"Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature."

"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."

"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."

"April is the cruellest month."

"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them."

"If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it.""

"Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know."

"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."

"It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words."

"In my beginning is my end."

"My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down."

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

"It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind."

"We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion."

"Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to."

"Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?"

"This love is silent."

"So the lover must struggle for words."

"O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."

"Where there is no temple there shall be no homes."

"The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason."

"And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness."

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper."

"The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself."

"All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords."

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

"Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative."

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

"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."