“LifeThe machineThe human soulA 75mm breechMy portrait”

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”

“Those letters under the doorA new lifeThe war at a distanceand my drinking glass that smokesA brightness crowns the universe("Two Poems")”

“Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.”

“Equilibrium is the state of death, only chaos produces lifeThe Ancient Greeks have been driven to extinction by too much search for architectural harmony.”

“For books are more than books, they are the lifeThe very heart and core of ages past,The reason why men lived and worked and died,The essence and quintessence of their lives.”