Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.

A new world is only a new mind.

It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.

No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.

But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.

Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.