I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute.

Words, words. They're all we have to go on.