Basil Bunting Quotes

The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

I hate Science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.