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.

To tell one comprehensive story of how it has happened that what is is, one which shall hold true, come what may, now-after - a story that whatever comes shall perfectly continue or confirm: such is the ideal motive of religions.

Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.

When ... I comprehended that poetry had no provision in it for ultimate practical attainment of the rightness of work that is truth, but led on ever only to a temporizing less- than-truth ... I stopped.

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

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

I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.