Good writing is always new.

Se amava quel viso non indulgente, era perché era netto, espressivo e risoluto.Vedeva, o gli sembrava di vedere, come tali qualità fossero state mascherate o soffocate da atteggiamenti più convenzionali: una modestia simulata, un’appropriata pazienza,...

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for...

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean...

…failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements… Any one of the old four – earth, air, fire, water – can betray...

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.

She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and...

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like...

You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalised love, for this, or that, or the universe – which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in...

…words have been all my life, all my life–this need is like the Spider’s need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out–the silk is her life, her home,...

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the...

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser’s golden apples in the...

I think, yes, a man and a woman can be good friends, but it isn’t easy for them being as no one else will suppose that that is what they are. And then there’s the...

History, writing, infect after a time a man’s sense of himself…

Think of this- that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

He invented a machine for reading underwater and nearly drowned in the bath because it worked.

He had been violently confused by her real presence in the opposite inaccessible corner. For months he had been possessed by the imagination of her. She had been distant and closed away, a princess in...

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent...

They did go on so, don’t you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously,” he said, pushing the lift button, summoning it from the depths.As it creaked up, Blackadder said, “That’s not...

You will not be here–I shall not be here–much longer.”Let us not think of time.”We have reached Faust’s non-plus. We say to every moment “Verweile doch, du bist so sch&oumln,” and if we are not...

This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will...

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.

She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom...

You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.

Outside our small safe place flies mystery.

He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or...

My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage.

But I cannot love her as I did, because she is not open, because she withholds what matters, because she makes me, with her pride or her madness, live a lie.

…I have always believed I cd diagnose this state of being in love, which they regard as most particular, as inspired by item, one pair of black eyes or indifferent blue, item, one graceful attitude...

She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke.

The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor...

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.

A metamorphosis… The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.

Perhaps if I had made his life more difficult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated,I have at least...

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

[H]is mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a...

Contemporary’ was in those days [1953] synonymous with ‘modern’ as it had not been before and is not now [1977].

She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.

Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap’s versifying.