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

People who cannot feel punish those who do.

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

a poet never feels useful.

What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.

My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.

For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.