“I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?”

I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.

Death is just infinity closing in.

A writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated.

For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

A system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one of such aspects.

A writer’s work is the product of laziness.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.

In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.

Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.

In my next life I will try to commit more errors.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.

An excuse which, if carried to its legitimate conclusion, would leave our business men weeping on one another’s shoulders over human frailty, while they picked one another’s pockets.

In our Country… one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

But coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.

All of us in Parliament now have a responsibility to get on with the process of leaving the EU and securing a more prosperous future for Britain as an open, global, trading nation.

Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Leaving the European Union really does give us a chance as a country to become more outward-looking, to become more competitive, and to deepen our links with our partners right across the world.

Old people have fewer diseases than the young, but their diseases never leave them.

War is too serious a matter to leave to soldiers.