A great poet ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings... to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature.
When we really start to take a look at who we think we are... we start to see that while we may have various thoughts, beliefs, and identities, they do not individually or collectively tell us who we are. [And yet] it is astounding how completely we humans define ourselves by the content of our minds, feelings, and history.
I turn on the TV sometimes, start watching something and think: 'This seems quite good, a bit familiar.' Then I realise … It's one of my movies. It's a pretty odd feeling.
All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
We are all basically the same human beings, who seek happiness and try to avoid suffering. Everybody is my peer group. Your feeling "I am of no value" is wrong. Absolutely wrong.
Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.
All people in the world - who are not hermits or mutes - speak words. They speak different languages, but they speak words. They say, "How are you" or "I'm not feeling well" all over the world. These common words - these common elements that we have between us - the writer has to take some verbs and nouns and pronouns and adjectives and adverbs and arrange them in a way that sound fresh.
Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I don't really feel, of understanding things I don't understand, being able to do things I'm not able to do... Can it really be allowable for anyone who feels like it to hypnotize another person, or many other persons, and then do what he likes with them? Particularly if the hypnotist is the first unscrupulous individual who happens to come along?