I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

And I, love, am a pathological liar.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.

Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.