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

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress.

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

In a total work, the failures have their not unimportant place.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.