Ban poetry. And make sure that anyone caught reading it is expelled from school. Then it will acquire the glamour.

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.

Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right.

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.

Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a brown condom full of walnuts.

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.

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.