Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

To be at peace with others you must be at peace with yourself.

One has to attain an ego-less state (nir-ahankari)

It is impossible for a man to outpace his shadow.

I wanted to write some lyrics that had some meaning to them, lyrics that were meaningful to me and hopefully people can take something from that.

The scrum and the tackle are the two really contentious areas of the game. If you get those two aspects right, most rugby matches will work in your favour.

If I spent my time worrying about what other people would think of my work, I would be too self-conscious to write.

I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.

In not making the decision, you've made one. Not doing something is the same as doing it.

No- I cannot talk of books in a ballroom; my head is always full of something else.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.