Rush, that most exciting perversion of life, the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should be truly allowed for its doing.

When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.

It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.

Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done.

How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemiansism. When you were drunk or when you committed adultery you recognised your own personal fallability of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Majakowski.

There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!

Pound's crazy. All poets are.... They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.