I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy.

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals.

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.