I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.
So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour's term
To practice for Eternity.
The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that...
But to poetry — You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying.
Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.
In silence the heart raves. It utters words
Meaningless, that never had
A meaning.
The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him.