Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

The breath that sharpens life is life itself.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.

I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.