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.

Praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

I can offer you only: this world like a knife

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.

something has been said for sobriety but very little.

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

Wishin' was dyin' but I gotta make it all this way to that bed on these feet.