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.

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.

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 the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

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

I just didn't want to shoot other people.