Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense. - W. H. Auden

Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.

The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.

For the others, like me, there is only the flash
Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one
Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass
To meet one’s madness