“My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn't write
What the night pencilled in”

Final television interview with Melvyn Bragg (5 April 1994)

Source: Blood Promise

Source: Lover Unbound

My Address, written in Military Prisons of Bogiati, 5 June 1971 – After beating.
Poetry, Vi scrivo da un carcere in Grecia (I write you from a prison in Greece) (1974)

On Alan Lee
In the Artist's Studio interview (2010)
Context: From Alan, I learned to take a more instinctive and intuitive approach to pencil work. I used to let my mind get far too far ahead of my pencil, which can be productive, but removes the serendipitous switch of direction when the pencil and hand discover an idea the mind’s eye had missed. Drawing at the right speed is a sort of graphic contrapposto providing what I’d be tempted to call an “intuitional resilience” unobtainable with more energetic methods. I very much enjoyed working with him, a situation of symbiosis between enthusiasm and despair, the former because his work is just so good, the latter because his work is just so good. He is hard to keep up with, but then I believe he says the same of me. He is a dear friend and a wonderful artist.

Variant translations:
Memory of sun fades in my heart
What is this? Darkness? Maybe! —
During the night comes
winter.
"Memory of the Sun" (alternate translation by Paula Goodman)
Thinking Of The Sun (1911)

track 11, "Three Easy Payments"
Mitch All Together (2003)

As quoted in Al-Jaami' al-Saghîr by Imam al-Suyuti, where it is declared a "weak Hadith".
Variant translations:
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.
The Islamic Review, Vol. 22 (1934), p. 105, edited by Khwajah Kamal al-Din
The ink of scholars will be weighed in the scale with the blood of martyrs.
As quoted in Knowledge of God in Classical Sufism: Foundations of Islamic Mystical Theology (2004) by John Renard
Sunni Hadith

Source: Haunted