It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows, I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. "Smothered it," I say promptly. After enough lessons the terminology becomes second nature.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.