The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.

Going to Europe, someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no-one returned the same. Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney; momentous objects, beings and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

Marriage is like democracy - it doesn't really work, but it's all we've been able to come up with.

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.