I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart, such as I have felt it since my childhood.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent; A thing brought forth that we didn't know we had in us, So we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out And stood in the light, licking its tail.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one else can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is a proof that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups-assuming one is a painter-extracted something that transcends them.

At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty ? not as the ability to form mutual relationships with others, but as the kind of absolute power of "use and abuse" over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman man's household ? to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, about the origins of human society in some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.

When you say things like 'We have to wipe out the Taliban ' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that you know America created anyway.

I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart such as I have felt it since my childhood.

Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience therefore would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.