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.

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

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

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

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

I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.