How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting!

People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.

Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff.

I have sometimes wondered also whether in people like me who come to the boil fast (soupe au lait, the French call this trait, like a milk soup that boils over) the tantrum is not a built-in safety valve against madness or illness. ... The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won't boil over!

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time.