Well, I love fishing. I wouldn't kill a fly myself but I've no hesitation in killing a fish. A lot of men are like that. No bother. Out you come. Thump. And that's not the only reason.

Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that.

A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.

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

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.