The dark uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

Read at whim! Read at whim!

We can't tell our life from our wish

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

An imagination left alone in the dark can be a terrible thing.

Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.

Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives.

Time cancels young pain.

I am wholeheartedly in favour of an independent Scotland.

I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die.

Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.

A wise ruler takes advice, but should never be seen to take it. Let them think you know more than you do. It will not harm them, and it will help you.

When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.

There has been a substitution of ideology for fact and scientific and engineering data in this administration.