The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem?

Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.

The British secret service was staffed at one point almost entirely by alcoholic homosexuals working for the KGB

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.

What is Camille Paglia doing, writing that an actress as gifted as Anne Heche has the mental depth of a pancake? How many pancake brains could do what Heche did with David Mamet's dialogue in Wag the Dog? No doubt Heche has been stuck with a few bad gigs, but Paglia, of all people, must be well aware that being an actress is not the same safe ride as being the tenured university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.