Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.

I do read everything that we publish. We usually have to have two or three votes for a book before we take it on. So in that sense I suppose it is an orchestra.

I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.

[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.

I often feel I'm working in a vacuum, or in a country where few readers hear the sounds.

Men are most virile and attractive between the ages of 35 and 55. Under 35 a man has too much to learn, and I don't have time to teach him.

The tricky thing becomes: Do you know yourself well enough to then portray that on screen? And for me, I find that really hard. I'd rather hide behind accents and funny walks.

If you hunch your shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed.

But I found that the longer you teach, the more you feel like a total stranger to yourself

I love all those stupid, cheesy chat-up lines like 'Did God take the stars out of the sky and put them into your eyes?' But I never get chatted up.

Fairest of stars, last in the train of night, If better thou belong not to the dawn.

You come first, the clothes later. Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Be creative.

A strenuous soul hates cheap success.

The nuances and organic characteristics of a character become second nature if I'm doing my job well.

My career suffered massively because I had a reputation for being a very tabloid person.