Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?

If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.

In the end, there is no end.

We feel the machine slipping from our hands As if someone else were steering; If we see light at the end of the tunnel, It's the light of the oncoming train.

The world is absolutely out of control now and is not going to be saved by any reason or unreason.

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat.

It is night, And it is vanity, and age Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear, The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.

Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

I was overcome with an attack of pathological enthusiasm.

You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things.

The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.

All limits exist only in the mind, and it is only in the mind that they can be overcome.

A common danger unites even the bitterest enemies.

I have very eclectic tastes.

Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

Allegiance, after all, has to work two ways; and one can grow weary of an allegiance which is not reciprocal.

I'd rather learn how to prevent failure than how to gain success, because for what is success other than a state of mind?

Oh yeah, I'm an Essex boy and proud of it.

There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.