When you’re young you try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in. - Randall Jarrell

One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that “the way it really was” half the time is, and half the time isn’t, the way it ought to be in the novel.

In Stage II guilt is first of all social, liberal, moral guilt — a guilt so general as to seem almost formal. It is we who are responsible, either by commission or — more generally — by omission, for everything from killing off the Tasmanians to burning the books at Alexandria. (You didn’t do it? Then you should have stopped them from doing it. You never heard of it? Ignorant as well as evil, eh? You weren’t born? You’re guilty, I tell you — guilty.)

...just as great men are great disasters, overwhelmingly good poets are overwhelmingly bad influences.