I experience for the American officers and soldiers that friendship which arises from having shared with them for a length of time dangers, sufferings, and both good and evil fortune.
Them
Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor?
If we depend for our happiness on another, on society or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them, and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort.
‘War and Peas’ by Michael Foreman, one of the great British children’s illustrators. His watercolours are so lovely you could almost eat them, just as members of the target audience have been trying to do for decades.
If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.
Western countries in particular can today no longer be separated from Muslim societies, because they have them within themselves. They are themselves internally globalized.
It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.
I’ve said what I’m prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you’re going to tell them a whole lot more.
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.