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

Deep down there was understanding, not of the facts of our lives so much as of our essential natures.

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.