Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind.

'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere 'lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation oа reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.

I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.

Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.

Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.