Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.