Wallace Stevens

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

Money is a kind of poetry.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

The point of vision and desire are the same.