A good poem about failure is a success.
Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any – after all, most people are unhappy, don’t you think?
I am always trying to ‘preserve’ things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.
Here is an unfenced existance.
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...