Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.