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.

Generally it is our failures that civilize us. Triumph confirms us in our habits.

Freedom and diversity guard each other, and if a country could form the whole of one's character, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo would have been the same person... if national identity means anything, it means something that comes with you wherever you go, and stays with you no matter how long you stay away.

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?

Writers quite often starve. And I'm mainly just writing critical prose and poetry, that's a formula for starvation.

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

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