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Poets are like the decathletes of literature.

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.

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 behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

I think with every writer there are two people there.

It's what all writers dream of, that our work finds a measure of immortality that long outlives the words of any critic.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

Novels are longer than life.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

Literature has become my life.

The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.