Under the old system - which is now so archaic that a lot of people can't remember it - if you wanted money you had to go to the bank and take the money out in cash form, and you couldn't take out money that you didn't have. But with the credit card you can spend money you don't have, and that is just so tempting.

My favorite author's question of all time - because it's so simple to answer ... 'Is your hair really like that, or do you get it done?

Richard liked to say he picked things up for a song, which was odd, because he never sang. He never even whistled. He was not a musical person.

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.

Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn't as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social media. So if you were found face down on the floor - people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always - or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumor, and rumors are hard to pin down.