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Character is destiny.

Sitting there beside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future.

We are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

"Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.

The world is boiling. You hardly dare open a paper these days: the news is all of cataclysm and collapse. Tempers are threadbare; the yobs are winning; everybody accepts the fact that they’ve got to get nastier in order to survive. The world is going bad on us. I’m having nothing to do with it.

What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.

I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems to be no extra room for me inside.

I think it was Montherlant who said that happiness writes white: it doesn't show up on the page.

The past weaves round all this; we still duck in and out of its lost but shimmering kingdoms.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.

Imagine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of an emery=board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history. We haven't been around for very long. And we've turned the earth's hair white. She seemed to have eternal youth but now she's ageing awful fast, like an addict, like a waxless candle. Jesus, have you seen her recently? We used to live and die without any sense of the planet getting older, of mother earth getting older, living and dying. We used to live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping past our ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. And maybe love can't bear it either, and flees all planets when they reach this condition, when they get to the end of their twentieth centuries.