The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.

If we want a book to do more than what it does, that's a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that's an endorsement.

Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail.

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS.

The first language that I learned was Italian in Italy in the early and middle-'60s and I had to do that to keep up with the young men who were courting my wife.