The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.' 'I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.' He turned. 'You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy.'

No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.

You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.

Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise.