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

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.

It's filled with magic that's how I know if something's real.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

A boomerang returns back to the person who throws it.But first, while moving in a circle, it hits its target.So does gossip.

What really, really inspires me is that you don't see many black superheroes on television.

Nature does not compromise; a pelican is not a compromise between a crow and otter, it is just a pelican. Nature makes no compromises; any inefficient products are recalled to the manufacturer!

I don't want people to judge books by their cover, I want people to be open minded to the rest of the world.

If you wish a general to be beaten, send him a ream full of instructions; if you wish him to succeed, give him a destination, and bid him conquer.

There are things that have gone on in thr USA for years and years and have never been addressed, and they need to be.

I am delighted at Des's support in these elections. And thank him for his rewrite of the lyrics of Send in the Clowns which we are planning to sing at our South East conference.

Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.