poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

Write about winter in the summer.

I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.

Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet.