I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others &...

Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful – great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone...

Morning, noon & bloody night,Seven sodding days a week,I slave at filthy WORK, that mightBe done by any book-drunk freak.This goes on until I kick the bucket.FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT

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...

What are days for?Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over.They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days?Ah, solving that questionBrings the priest and the...

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.

You know, I know I should be just as panicky as you about the filthy work – one wants to do nothing in the evenings, certainly not spread rotten books around & dredge for a...

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you’re an artist, by children if you’re not.

They say eyes clear with age.

Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word–the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriagesLasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.

I had a moral tutor, but never saw him (the only words of his I remember are ‘The three pleasures of life -drinking, smoking, and masturbation’)

he [Llewelyn Powys] has always in mind the great touchstone Death & consequently life is always judged as how far it fits us, or compensates us, for ultimately dying.

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It’s very strange how often strong feelings don’t seem to carry any message of action.

When I throw back my head and howlPeople (women mostly) sayBut you’ve always done what you want, You always get your way- A perfectly vile and foulInversion of all that’s been.What the old ratbags meanIs...

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but...

MaturityA stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,I shall have, till my single body grows Inaccurate, tired;Then I shall start to feel the backward pullTake over, sickening and masterful — Some say, desired.And this...

Dear, I can’t write, it’s all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

Caught in the center of a soundless fieldWhile hot inexplicable hours go byWhat trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?You seem to ask.I make a sharp reply,Then clean my stick. I’m glad I can’t...

Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.

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.

In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.

It’s funny: one starts off thinking one is shrinkingly sensitive & intelligent & always one down & all the rest of it: then at thirty one finds one is a great clumping brute, incapable of...

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn’t true!

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

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?

When getting my nose in a bookCured most things short of school,It was worth ruining my eyesTo know I could still keep cool,And deal out the old right hookTo dirty dogs twice my size.Later, with...

MCMXIVThose long uneven linesStanding as patientlyAs if they were stretched outsideThe Oval or Villa Park,The crowns of hats, the sunOn moustached archaic facesGrinning as if it were allAn August Bank Holiday lark;And the shut shops,...

Saki says that youth is like hors d’oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don’t notice it. When you’ve had them, you wish you’d had more hors d’oeuvres.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.

You can’t put off being young until you retire.

SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.

Uncontradicting solitudeSupports me on its giant palm;And like a sea-anemoneOr simple snail, there cautiouslyUnfolds, emerges, what I am.

life is first boredom, then fear.whether or not we use it, it goes,and leaves what something hidden from us chose,and age, and then the only end of age.

I am always trying to ‘preserve’ things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

AubadeI work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a...

Sex means nothing–just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

When I was a child, I thought,Casually, that solitudeNever needed to be sought.Something everybody had,Like nakedness, it lay at hand,Not specially right or specially wrong,A plentiful and obvious thingNot at all hard to understand.Then, after...

Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything – these are sort of ‘ideal’ poems that one feels ought to be written, but don’t...

Life has a practice of living you, if you don’t live it.

Next, PleaseAlways too eager for the future, wePick up bad habits of expectancy.Something is always approaching; every dayTill then we say,Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear,Sparkling armada of promises draw near.How slow they are!...

Long Sight In AgeThey say eyes clear with age, As dew clarifies air To sharpen evenings, As if time put an edge Round the last shape of things To show them there; The many-levelled trees,...

So many things I had thought forgottenReturn to my mind with stranger pain:Like letters that arrive addressed to someoneWho left the house so many years ago.

An Arundel TombSide by side, their faces blurred,The earl and countess lie in stone,Their proper habits vaguely shownAs jointed armour, stiffened pleat,And that faint hint of the absurd -The little dogs under their feet.Such plainness...

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It’s more like a desire to separate a piece of one’s experience & set it up on...