If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.

There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.

Civilization begins with distillation

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.