“The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet’s duty to hold the line.”

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, ‘Look at it, listen to it.’ Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

I hate Science. It denies a man’s responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God’s fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.

To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That’s not poetry’s purpose.

Men are fools to invest in real estate.

Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166

Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

In the marathon of life, there is no finish line.

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what’s remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.

I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never plotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.

Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.

I always have problems with seeing how our new stuff relates to our old stuff – I’m better at seeing long lines in other people’s music than in my own.

The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.

I loved English literature – if didn’t it would have been hard – but I had to learn it myself. I remembered ways to repeat words, to put more emphasis on certain lines.

I always assumed scientists were free to ask any question, pursue any line of inquiry without fear or reprisal.