My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would say that I'd thought they were made of candy and had eaten them.

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.