Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?

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.

The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.

Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.

I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.

Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.