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.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.

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.