I do not remember-that is the point-the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it.

Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.

"Do you serve women at this bar?" "No," says the barman, "you've got to bring your own."

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.

Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.

Though lovers be lost, love shall not.

He was himself a homeless bachelor with a past, much in debt, and nothing gave more pleasure than to envy his friends their wives and comforts and to speak of them intimately and disparagingly.

There is only one position for an artist anywhere: and that is, upright.

Gwilym was a tall young man aged nearly twenty, with a thin stick of a body and spade-shaped face. You could dig the garden with him.

The light of the one weak lamp in a rusty circle fell across the brickheaps and the broken wood and the dust that had been houses once, where the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost.