I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.

Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.

Grass is the least rewarding of all status symbols... The grass does nothing but drink money, exhaust energies, crush spirits, destroy sleep, create tensions and interfere with the watching of baseball games, and sprout insolent signs ordering humans to keep off it.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

Ireland really is my problem; the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is

Schoolteachers seemed determined to persuade me that 'classic' is a synonym for 'narcotic'.