And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

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

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.

People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.

When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.