I live in a developing country.
America, ladies and gentlemen, has done more for me financially than Britain ever has, or ever could have done.
Poetry forces a writer to condense and crystallise his thoughts and often represents a short cut to truths unsuspected by the author himself.
When you come across real talent, it is sometimes worth allowing them to create the structure in which they choose to labor. In nine cases out of ten, by inviting them to take responsibility and control for a new venture, you will motivate them to do great things.
You shouldn't go around the world behaving ruthlessly when you don't have to. Sometimes you do have to. There is only so much pie to go around. If you're going to take more than your fair share of pie, as socialists would look at it, then someone else is not getting his. That means you've got to take it away from them.
America is an empire. I hope you know that now. All empires, by definition, are bumbling, shambolic, bullying, bureaucratic affairs, as certain of the rightness of their cause in infancy, as they are corrupted by power in their dotage.
Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.
The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings. . . All murdered; for within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king, keeps Death his court. . . and with a little pin bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
I left for Petersburg in August, 1871 and stayed there until 1879.