There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.

When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.

Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.