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Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art.

Intuition enlightens and so links up with pure thought. They together become an intelligence which is not simply of the brain, which does not calculate, but feels and thinks.

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale.

I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

I think that a good deal of poetry and art gives us some sense of access to another's voice, perception, texture of thought, imagination. Sometimes it gives us better access to the strangeness in ourselves.