“The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.”

Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood, The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees with his ears and hands As much or more than once with both his eyes.

New beginnings and new shoots Spring again from hidden roots Pull or stab or cut or burn, Love must ever yet return.

To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.

Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark a shining space With the grave ‘s narrowness, though not its peace.

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.

Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight

I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

I revise the manuscript till I can’t read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it’s retyped again. Then there’s a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

I have done many impious things–no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.

Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight

The poet’s first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself-which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.

If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species – if separate species we be – for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.

It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.

I loved Westerns as a little kid, and I loved horror films.

The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa’s major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.

I don’t inflict horrors on readers.

It was also the root cause of EC’s success; kids were looking for ways to numb themselves to this horror that they felt.

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.