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.

If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.

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

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.

I don't think of myself all the time.

When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.