I know. I'm very hard to talk to. I realize that.

One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

He seemed unaware of the messiness of the arrangement.

If there is an amateur reader still left in the world - or anybody who just reads and runs - I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.

The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.