I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.... storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. Life, Pascal said, is like living in a prison from which every day fellow prisoners are taken away to be executed. We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends.

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.

Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude.

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

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.