In his autobiography Stravinsky relates that the first music he remembers was made by a peasant, working his hand in his armpit to produce a rhytmic farting.

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings– they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain. I have never seen one fly, but sometimes...

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the...

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

…much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening....

Begin with the soft smelted upturned heart-shaped mouth made for smiling a smile kept for kindness, tenderness, incapable of malice. Am I going too fast for you?The almond eyes see out through their sleepy epicanthic...

He was making music – Howells, Finzi, Holst – so you could see the sounds in the serried air.Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes.