I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.

An eye for an eye only leads to more blindness.

Love was like a steamroller. There was no avoiding it; it went over you and you came out flat.

I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.