When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.

As Coleridge said, "We receive but what we give." The happy life is a life of continual generosity in which we go out to meet and acclaim the world.

One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.

It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

We should all live as if we were never going to die, for it is the deaths of our friends that hurt us, not our own.

A bad memory is the mother of invention.

We soon cease to feel the grief at the deaths of our friends, yet we continue to the end of our lives to miss them. They are still with us in their absence.