I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature.

We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

I can offer you only: this world like a knife

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

Offering Dragons quarter is no good, they regrow all their parts and come on again. They have to be killed.

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.