That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.

What you really have to know is one: yourself. And the only way you can know that one is in the mirror of the others. And the only way you can see into the mirror of the others is by love or its opposite—by profound emotion. Certainly not by curiosity—by dancing around asking, looking, making notes. You have to live relationships to know.

A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.

Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.