“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

Love had a thousand shapes.

It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.

I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

A light here required a shadow there.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

I’ve had some wonderful love affairs and some that didn’t work out. I don’t want to dwell on that and I don’t want to put people down, but I think all the fabulous places I’ve been, the wonderful things that have happened for me, the great people I’ve met – that ought to make a story.

[Cultural department] understand nothing but bureaucratic daily affairs. They don’t care about culture.

Happiness is never a negative affair; it is to be won by men who are fully alive, full of the joy of living.

In the UK cycling was very popular until the end of the 1950’s but it really lost out to our love affair with the car.

Iran began a policy of expanding its revolution, of interfering with the affairs of its neighbors

Too many expedients may spoil an affair.

To separate man and woman at school, at work, at meetings, in short, to separate them at life, is the affair of perverted and fusty minds! Where there is separation, there is excessive primitiveness!

Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.