I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.

All I know is a door into the dark