When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.

There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.

For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.

Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.