How has anyone ever understood anyone, except through love, which is wordless?

Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.

For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God's involvement in it.

So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.

All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.