Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.

Clearly money has something to do with life.

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.

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

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?

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.