In England it's a rare thing to see a player smoking but all in all I prefer that to an alcoholic. The relationship with alcohol is a real problem in English football and in the short term it's much more harmful to a sportsman. It weakens the body which becomes more susceptible to injury.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.

Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.

However I must say that I am very happy to see that we have such a positive result for our first referendum in our history and that gives me more confidence in Taiwan's democracy.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches copies of copies until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity doubt uncertainty not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material but because that is the way we humans really are.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints such people have a corpse in their mouth.

I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.

In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape sometimes out of one's cultural myths and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.