And it's impossible for me to read Henry James..

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood..

And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a….

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense..

A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest..

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so..

There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that ….

I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that..

I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out..

I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own..

Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away..

Well, I love fishing. I wouldn't kill a fly myself but I've no hesitation in killing a fish. A lot of men are like that. No bother. Out you come. Thu….

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person..

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up ….

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry..

If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex..

It's like breathing in and out to me. It's like having a conversation with someone who isn't there. Because it has to be addressed to somebody - not ….

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous b….

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century..

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about..

And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, ….