I don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?" Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness.

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. "Save them for my funeral," I'd said.

As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical.

I'm happier writing about doctors than I would have been being one.

I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

I think that as far as language goes I'm an American, I'm afraid, my accent is American, my way of talk is an American way of talk, I'm an old-fashioned American. That's probably one of the reasons why I'm in England now and why I'll always stay in England.