“Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn’t a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.”

You used to say. “Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.” Madness doubled is marriage I added when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce a golden rule.

Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public.

He stood against the wind and let it peel him clean.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

I am a drop of gold he would say I am molten matter returned from the core of earth to tell you interior things.

You doubt God? Well more to the point I credit God with the good sense to doubt me. What is mortality after all but divine doubt flashing over us? For an instant God suspends assent and poof! we disappear.

To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

Comfortable means gradually more and more flattened down, more and more blunt – less and less sharp and biting into you.

Revenge is not worthy of you. If you concentrate on revenge, you will keep those wounds fresh that would otherwise have healed.

I was a wonderful parent before I had children.

Some, while deploring animal abuses, on the same breath approve ‘benefits to humans from certain animal abuses’!

It was a real character piece.

We are defined and controlled by all that we have not transcended.

The past is for learning from and letting go.

To have a spirit implies that you are spirit and that you are also something else.

Do not look at life’s long sorrow; see how small each moment’s pain.