I think politics is important. It's how we run our society. I think it should be natural to have an interest in the subject and I almost don't understand why some people don't.

In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

Compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof it is temporary expedient often wise in party politics almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

Politics is almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once but in politics many times.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things but to me they're more visual than oral and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats almost 100 years old now and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

That sense of a life in natural objects which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice was then in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.