It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time.

There is only one real deprivation... and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most.

I tell the gods are still alive / And they are not consoling.

It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

If one is the kind of creature I am and wants to do the kind of writing I want to do, an undisturbed bourgeois existence with no distractions seems in order. A single meeting outside the family upsets one's whole inner web, makes one start off on two-days' thinking and weighing, destroys a delicate balance etc. etc. ... I now have enough friends to last me a lifetime and that is enough. I am going to close the doors and hibernate at least for a couple of years. I am frightfully depressed about my work. It seems to me perfectly mediocre.