But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

All you can usually say about a poem or a picture is, 'Look at it, listen to it.' Whether you listen to a piece of music or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

I hate Science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.

Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?