I have wished you something None of the others would...
Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
Dear, I can’t write, it’s all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn’t true!
You can’t put off being young until you retire.
As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like.
Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
In everyone there sleeps. A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make. By loving others, but across most it sweeps. As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.
I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.
I listen to money singing, it’s like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad...
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break.
But superstition, like belief, must die...
One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.