Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

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.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.

I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.

A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.