In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it...

Small tyrants, threatened by big,sincerely believethey love liberty.

Drama is based on the Mistake.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor...

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely...

The friends who met here and embraced are gone,Each to his own mistake;

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietzsche.)A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it, but...

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

He is the Way.Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.He is the Truth.Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;You will come to a great city that has...

Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.

All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.

To save your world, you asked this man to die:Would this man, could he see you now, asked why?

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could...

Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.

Evil is unspectacular and always human,And shares our bed and eats at our own table ….

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter’s waking thoughts.

Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.

I have never, I think, wanted to ‘belong’ to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resented exclusion. Why should thet accept me? All I have ever asked is that others should...

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

If you want romance, fuck a journalist.

Coleridge’s description of Iago’s actions as “motiveless malignancy” applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian villains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive, and,...

Say this city has ten million souls,Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

And maps can really point to placesWhere life is evil now:Nanking. Dachau.

Funeral BluesStop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drumBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overheadScribbling on...

Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;Gide, though I didn’t know it then, gave part.They taught me to express my deep abhorrenceIf I caught anyone preferring ArtTo Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart.I...

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.

After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits...