Passion is for holidays, not homecoming.
I care about doing the work as best as I can do, and that it should go on reaching people. It’s not about fame and it’s not about me. It’s about creating something that might allow someone else to create something.
Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.
The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: ‘Never let a boy touch you down there.’ I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.
The impulse to worship is impossible to eradicate. Even the most prosaic have to worship something.
I know I’ve had an unusual beginning and a colourful life, but that wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t make it speak to other people.
Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.
In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.
When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.
What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.
A homosexual is further away from a woman than a rhinoceros.
It is the nature of walls that they should fall.
Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.
Why is the mind incapable of deciding its own subject matter? Why when we desperately want to think of one thing to we invariably think of another?
Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.
We’re living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they’re eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.
I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn’t matter at all.
Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.
You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That’s a real challenge.
I think we are worlds compressed into human form.