All will be lost apart from happiness.
One has to choose a word in English. If you want to be eligible for a literary prize you have to designate it as something.
Wonder - the sensation of being whisked out of time and space. . . to be bathed in. . . epiphanous delight.
Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.
I am coming from an older school, and I feel that you must learn to wait. There is that essay which was about the great notion of sitting on the mountain and waiting for the muses to cross the stream, and give you the symbols that would allow you to create. The word wait seems to me to be terribly important.
You are obviously writing out of experience and so the boundaries are always blurred, it is just that sometimes it would seem that you are playing with fire a little bit by choosing someone that obviously existed.
I think it is an important question of our lives - what is the meaning of literature to us as humans.
The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.
If a professional musician in a symphony orchestra is playing Beethoven. But this particular orchestra have played this particular chestnut so many times, they can play it in their sleep. Does the genius remain present in the music or not?
In Advance of All Parting is a tough, unsentimental examination of marital grief. Musically elegant and inventive, understated and passionate, the poems give us a profound glimpse into how the events of a life can form a center of gravity that fixes the self in its force field. Theres a cold, truth-telling clarity about them that makes them as unsettling as they are beautiful. Ansie Baird has created a richly-drawn world in which this elemental drama plays out, and the result is vivid, startling poems in which pain has left its indelible tracks.
If you're scared of dying you better not be scared to live.