I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.
It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self, the more you do.
Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.
An odd phrase, “by heart,” he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
You know, it’s a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child’s surprise at the world.
Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
Lists are a form of power.
Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap’s versifying.
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity.
Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.
Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
Young girls are sad. They like to be; it makes them feel strong.
One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.
The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.
I don’t see much point in doing things for a pure joke. Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do.
I was no good at being a child.