It would be better if only the old men fought the wars. Every country is the country of youth. When its youth dies, it dies with them.

A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe; a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.

One of the things that's particularly nefarious about Ebola is that it continues to live in a dead person for some period of time after death. A person who's been dead for a day or two may still be seething with Ebola virus.

In 20th-century poetry, Robert Graves is to love what Philip Larkin is to mortality.

Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.