I think there are a lot more important things than art in the world. But not to me.

I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.

Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.