He lives out in Orchard Park. I mean, to be able to sit on the bench so patiently, for whatever part, and to be able to get up and do something, with such heroic competencies would be great.

You were saying that once when visiting Yale, you were struck that unlike Pound, Williams's thinking was volatile, I mean, did not stay locked into a pattern of concepts that then defined his subsequent necessary behavior, whereas Pound did.

The irony of our social group is that so often everyone feels this, but there's no company whatsoever in that feeling. Think of Pound's great emphasis, the way out is via the door.

Don't name it, as they say, because instantly you offer it to this peculiar authority.

It's as though all the terms of a family were present at one time rather than his dad and his mum. Not just a present authority, but the resident memory of what qualifies what else is the case.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!

The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to.

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.

First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.

There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement.

He lives out in Orchard Park. I mean, to be able to sit on the bench so patiently, for whatever part, and to be able to get up and do something, with such heroic competencies would be great.

And what's fascinating in The Ten Thousand Things is that although there's time, an inexorable time of the three generations of lives, actively present, but place is the time, time doesn't really have to do with simply the human experience of it.

The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.

All of which was OK, as that proved then, I certainly wouldn't contradict it as a necessary sense of things.

It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on.

You'll notice that Nancy Reagan never drinks water when Ronnie speaks.

I am concerned that the vague guidelines and policies used by the NSA for intelligence collection and sharing, in conjunction with elusive direction from the Administration, have led to intelligence being collected on sitting members of Congress for political purposes.

Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health.

If you look at the types of directors out there, I'm not as weird as most of them.

It is simply not true that war is solely a means to an end, nor do people necessarily fight in order to obtain this objective or that. In fact, the opposite is true: people very often take up one objective or another precisely in order that they may fight.

A practical way to travel between the stars is a must-have for space opera, and a sine qua non for our frequently vaunted future as a galactic society.

It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old.

The thing about Duran... that gives you the ability to bring all that opportunity back into your life.

I love to listen to books on tape.

I love lamb shank. It's my favorite thing. You don't have it in America. It's a younger meat - it just falls off the bone - it's kind of like a roast. I really like blackened cod too.

Every tear of sorrow sown by the righteous springs up a pearl.

I am greatly pleased with your account of Fanny; I found her in the summer just as you describe, almost another sister, I could not have supposed that a niece would ever have been so much to me. She is quite after one's own heart.

A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.

Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

We misfits are the ones with the ability to enter grief. Death. Trauma. And emerge.

My nature is to worry about everything too much.

Outsider. You do what you want, say what you want, and move on when you've worn out your welcome.

The 1980s was a time of the great recession of interactive entertainment. When Atari fell in 1982, until Nintendo launched its console, video games were an outcast for five years.

Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.

Know what suits you. Now I understand proportion and recognise the shapes that look good on my figure.

I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say 'pass the mustard'.

I would put belly laughing at the top of my highlights list. They always say that laughter is the best medicine.

When you feel your family is being threatened and hurt, you speak up. And then you put your head down and go back about your business.

The tyrant always talks as if he's preserving the best interests of his people when he actually acts to undermine them.