It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

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!

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.

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.

To forgive is a decision, to forget takes effort, to heal is a process, to believe again takes courage.

Do not make your mind a dumping ground for other people's garbage.

I am very romantic. In fact, I just renewed my vows... although it was with another woman.

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

Through discipline, discipline is the other side of discipleship. If you want to follow Jesus, you have to have discipline.

Setting down in writing, is a lasting memory.

I'm not very comfortable with what people sometimes say or think about me - things I don't feel responsible for.

Like Jesus we belong to the world living not for ourselves but for others. The joy of the Lord is our strength.

The hardest part of rowing properly: Eyes and Minds in The Boat!