For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.

It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.

It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.

The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult.

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.