When You Reach My Age, You Realize

The Aesthetic Event Is Something As Evident, As Immediate, As Indefinable As Love, The Taste Of Fruit, Of Water. We Feel Poetry As We Feel The Closeness Of A Woman, Or As We Feel A Mountain Or A Bay. If We Feel It Immediately, Why Dilute It With Other Words, Which No Doubt Will Be Weaker Than Our Feelings?

Captivated By Its Discipline, Humanity Forgets And Goes On Forgetting That It Is The Discipline Of Chess Players, Not Of Angels.

Mir Bahadur Ali Is, As We Have Seen, Incapable Of Evading The Most Vulgar Of Art's Temptations: That Of Being A Genius.

The Central Fact Of My Life Has Been The Existence Of Words And The Possibility Of Weaving Those Words Into Poetry.

Reality Is Partial To Symmetry And Slight Anachronisms