Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

A room is like a stage. If you see it without lighting, it can be the coldest place in the world.

You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.

But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.