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.

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.

There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility, -which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).

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

I can offer you only: this world like a knife

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

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.