You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.

If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.