Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.

Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.