Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

Death persecutes before it executes.

The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.