Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

At some point I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth.

Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

A great silence has descended on me for the last six months. I am as silent as an Arab in the desert, as dry, thirsty, and full of wonder and rumours which do not materialize into camels or travellers at all, but just vanish into the silent spaces from where they came. I expect this is a good thing though it is extremely irritating - the brink of a voice and never a voice.

More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it.