I know I've had an unusual beginning and a colourful life, but that wouldn't matter if I couldn't make it speak to other people.

And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

I don't understand why people talk of art as a luxury when it's a mind-altering possibility.

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment.