“There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.”

“But is this not what poetry must do? To say the nothing that cannot be said?”

“Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.”

“Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.” A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words.”

“You know, sometimes there’s absolutely nothing you can say about what you’ve been through, nothing. The whole trip is mind boggling. All you can do is shake your head and smile.”

“Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?”