All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can't get lost here.

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

I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

I'm working on the world, revised, improved edition, featuring fun for fools blues for brooders, combs for bald pates, tricks for old dogs.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.