Bloody men are like bloody buses - you wait for about a year and as soon as one approaches your stop two or three others appear.

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.

Some socks are loners They can't live in pairs.

Bloody Christmas, here again, let us raise a loving cup, peace on earth, goodwill to men, and make them do the washing up.

When a poem doesn't work, the first question to ask yourself is, 'Am I telling the truth?'

I have a theory that if you've got the kind of parents who want to send you to boarding school, you're probably better off at boarding school.

The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.

I like buying clothes, especially as I get a tax-deductible allowance.

The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.

I was single for a long time and felt very much alone in the world, and talk of family values upset me very much at that phase in my life, because I used to think: 'What about people like me?

I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.

Most people fail in the process of manifesting money or the things they truly desire when they rush to take action without aligning themselves to whatever it is they desire.

No man can claim to be free in real terms unless he is fully in control of his own destiny!

We are in truth more than a half of what we are by imitation.

If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.

I begin to understand as never before that holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.

Perseverance is a positive, active characteristic. It is not idly, passively waiting and hoping for some good thing to happen.

Culture is something that we all share and we are all the poorer for anyone excluded from it.

I believe that ultimately it all comes down to whether we seek conscious contact with God on a daily basis through prayer and meditation.

libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of travelling to distant lands

Enlightenment demands that you take responsibility for your way of life.