It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.