When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.

As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.

In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

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.