Underneath all his writing there is the settled determination to use certain words, to take certain attitudes, to produce a certain atmosphere; what he is seeing or thinking or feeling has hardly any influence on the way he writes. The reader can reply, ironically, 'That's what it means to have a style'; but few people have so much of one, or one so obdurate that you can say of it, 'It is a style that no subject can change.'

Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets - one they learned at college - and …

If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; a…

Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say 'perhaps' or 'I don't know,' so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.

By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is somet…

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

We are never such kleptomaniacs as in our juvenilia. We steal from our masters. We steal from our friends, from our enemies even. We try out tones of voice for…