What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.