A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

when General Eisenhower defined an intellectual as "a man who takes more words than is necessary to tell more than he knows", he was speaking not as a Republican but as an American.

If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast and as someone said, "If you're going to hang me, you mustn't expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.

The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.

Is an institution always a man's shadow shortened in the sun, the lowest common denominator of everybody in it?

More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.