Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.

It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or …

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.