I will not feel, I will notfeel, untilI have to

When I talk of hearing a poet’s voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.

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

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

And also I’m not good at inventing things. And also I’m not good at inventing things. I couldn’t invent a plot. I couldn’t invent a character.

When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.

Anybody who writes doesn’t like to be misunderstood.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can’t teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they’re very nice decor in a room – far better than paintings… That’s not quite true!

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

In some ways I’m a reticent man, and for quite a number of years there wasn’t very much of my real true deep feelings in my writing.

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

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 to, what they were doing, why...

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.

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

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 a particular person, or very rarely.

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.

I don’t think of myself all the time.

People haven’t got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.

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...

I find it’s impossible for me to read Proust.

The nineteenth century novels came from a time when there was no television and people had time to read novels in three volumes.

And if they haven’t got poetry in them, there’s nothing you can do that will produce it.

I just didn’t want to shoot other people.

There are books up there I haven’t read for many years but I wouldn’t put them out. I never know when I might want to read them again.

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 while. This happens to everybody.

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

Landscape is my religion….God in a green legend, I lean over the poolIn a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branchesAnd floored with a skin...

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 happens. I feel the same about...

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

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

I think these movements and become them, here,In this room’s stillness, none of them about,And relish them all-until I think of whereThrashed by a crook, the cursive adder writesQuick V’s and Q’s in the dust...

When I go fishing I like to know that there’s nobody within five miles of me.

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, and he reads in such a dry,...

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.