Advice to Young Journal Keepers. Be lenient with yourself. Conceal your worst faults, leave out your most shameful thoughts, actions, and temptations. Give yourself all the good and interesting qualities you want and haven't got. If you should die young, what comfort would it be to your relatives to read the truth and have to say: It is not a pearl we have lost, but a swine?

One must have the humility and the imagination to honor all deep human experiences - not least those one has never come near to sharing.

Looking back into childhood is like looking into a semi-transparent globe within which people and places lie embedded. A shake - and they stir, rise up, circle in inter-weaving groups, then settle down again.

But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.

It's the thought that counts.

anything that becomes a cult, or a mass movement, loses its moral and spiritual value. The crusade has to be personal, individual. As soon as it becomes collective it loses its purpose.

Holidays, if you enjoy them, have no history.