I think people in Botswana are pleased that my books paint a positive picture of their lives and portray the country as being very special. They've made a great success of their country and the people are fed up with the constant reporting of only the problems and poverty of the continent. They welcome something which puts the positive side.

I'm pleased to offer analysis of public policy and politics to the millions of Americans who get their news from Fox.

Please don't ask me any questions about the politics of 30 years ago.

Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect not a pleasurable memory of itself but an immediate constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose I can only do what I am given and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally in the end pleasure.

Even when poetry has a meaning as it usually has it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.