Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.

A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back

I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.