Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan

And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.

They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway.

They say the first love's most important. That's very romantic, but not my experience.

Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries.

No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning —three cheers for the ants.

Poets, if they're genuine, must keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvre.