Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep.

We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.

How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions! Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with each other for our ears; and science competes with all together. And for each we have a different set of ears. But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us.

Learning can be a bridge between doing and thinking. But then there is a danger that the person who uses learning as a bridge between doing and thinking may get stuck in learning and never get on to thinking.

Truth rings no bells.

My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.