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

The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.

She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.

Beyoncé and pathos are strangers. Amy Winehouse and pathos are flatmates, and you should see the kitchen.

Reading and writing... are exciting. The most exciting things I can think of. And now, as I reflect... I have to say that I've been lucky in that I'm amused by what I do - sufficiently amused.

In recent years, perhaps encouraged by competition from McDonald's, the British hamburger has become a credit to the nation. At the time of which I speak, it looked like a scorched beer-coaster or a tenderized disc brake.

I love reading about the sea. I love reading about it a lot more than actually being on the sea, when you think about it.