When you cut it up, put the pieces in your mouth and swallowed them, the British hamburger shaped itself to the bottom on your stomach like ballast, while interacting with your gastric juices to form an incipient belch of enormous potential, an airship which had been inflated in a garage. This belch, when silently released, would cause people standing twenty yards away to start examining the soles of their shoes. The vocalized version sounded like a bag of tools thrown into a bog.

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.

One of the virtues of the NHS... it doesn't worry you about money at the moment when you're least capable of doing anything about it.

Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.

I'm certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can't really speak them. I couldn't have stayed out of jail in most of them.

Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.