I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any – after all, most people are unhappy, don’t you think?
What will survive of us is love.
Saki says that youth is like hors d’oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don’t notice it. When you’ve had them, you wish you’d had more hors d’oeuvres.
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word – the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.
Originality is being different from oneself, not others.
Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
Most things may never happen: this one will.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.
I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.
They say eyes clear with age.
You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Picasso.
And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock...
I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.