For of course one is never safe when in love. Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves?

She became for me an island of light, fun, wisdom where I could run with my discoveries and torments and hopes at any time of day and find welcome.

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

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

I think that passion if really intense is always destructive if not to the two involved, always to other people.

A great silence has descended on me for the last six months. I am as silent as an Arab in the desert, as dry, thirsty, and full of wonder and rumours which do not materialize into camels or travellers at all, but just vanish into the silent spaces from where they came. I expect this is a good thing though it is extremely irritating - the brink of a voice and never a voice.