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.

One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.

I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

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