In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.

Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.