“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”

“Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the ki...”

“Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things. But what dies is the form. The matter is immortal.”

“She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?' 'I don't expect attractive men necessarily to...”

“Death starves us of life. So we learn to fabricate our own immortalities.”

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. And my feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who k...”

“Poetry had always seemed something I could turn to in need - an emergency exit, a lifebuoy, as well as a justification.”

“Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?' 'For fun?' 'Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not ficti...”