I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles ; phyllite is leafy-green.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.