Poet

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

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

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

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 used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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 enjoyed.

I don't think of myself all the time.

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.