A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.

One cat just leads to another. The place is so damned big it doesn't really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time.

We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important, into that more difficult time when it is a man's duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it.

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.

You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.

For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.