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

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.

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.

All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness.

If an artist is any good at all, then he or she will have a later phase that's more interesting than the early one.

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

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