The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

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.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.