A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it.

One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is?

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.