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and response.

Ralph Allen - quoted New Yorker Aug. 31, 1981

You don't want to have a costume that's funnier than you are.

If you lost it on the line, you get it on the take.

Max Furman - New Yorker - 8.31.81

And that one talent which is death to hide Lodg'd with me useless. John Milton

The Dyers Hand - W.H. Auden

Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical. p.337

Our very life depends on everything's Recurring till we answer from within The thousandth time may prove the charm.

p.349

Where poverty is accepted as normal and permeanent, the poor develop a certain style of living which extracts the maximum comfort from the minimum materials, but where poverty is held to be temporary or accidental, the preoccupation with escape

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leaves no time for such amenities; every European visitor to the States, I think, receives the impression that nowhere else in the world is real poverty - admittedly, rarer here than anywhere else - so cheerless, sordid and destitute of all grace.

p.329

In Praise of Limestone - Auden Collected Poems p.414-15

--------------examine this region

Of short distances and definite places:

---------------the monstrous forms and lives

With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common

So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works

Remains comprehensible: to become a pimp

Or dead in fake jewelry or ruin a fine tenor voice

For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all

But the best and the worse of us...

That is why I suppose

The Best and worse never stayed here long but sought

Immoderate soils where beauty was not so external,

The light less public...

The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,