A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

Anybody who writes doesn’t like to be misunderstood.

There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

Lovers may be and indeed generally are enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.

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

A great man is the man who does something for the first time.

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.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

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!

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

It is very iniquitous to make me pay my debts, you have no idea of the pain it gives one.

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

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.

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.

The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.

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

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste but they detest at leisure.

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...

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.

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 am sure of nothing so little as my own intentions.

The saddest thing that befalls a soul Is when it loses faith in God and woman.

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

All farewells should be sudden, when forever.

Romances I ne’er read like those I have seen.

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.

Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

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.

Nothing can confound a wise man more than laughter from a dunce.

Wives in their husbands’ absences grow subtler, And daughters sometimes run off with the butler.

I don’t think of myself all the time.

Her great merit is finding out mine – there is nothing so amiable as discernment.

Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

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