I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet-brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners.

The Earth has killed itself. It is black, petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst; insanity has blown it rotten; and no creatures at all, joyful, despairing, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face.

A truly comic, invented world must live at the same time as the world we live in.

They fall for the latest isms gullibly as pups for rubber bones.

Families, like countries, take their prophets unkindly, but a verse-speaker in the house is dishonor to be hooted.

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.

A good poem is a contribution to reality The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.

I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.

I know in London a Welsh hairdresser who has striven so vehemently to abolish his accent that he sounds like a man speaking with the Elgin marbles in his mouth.