“The older I get, the surer I am that I’m not running the show.”

I don’t even hate books anymore.

When passion dies friendship hovers round our flesh like flies.

There is a crack in everything.

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.

Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation.

We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made. In love we disappear.

You wanted to be the Superman who was never Clark Kent.

Ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars.

A young nurse is standing close behind me wondering whether she is being drawn by my power or her charity.

After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.

A kite is a victim you are sure of. You love it because it pulls.

You live your life as if it’s real, a thousand kisses deep.

To kiss her there was to intrude into something private and skeletal, like a turtle’s shoulder.

How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?

Your faith was strong, but you needed proof.

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

The situation with Tibet has to change.

Love can only exist where freedom and responsibility are operating.

That has to collapse. It’s the responsibility of heads of business who are going to do business in China to lay down the law.

Things don’t change in a marriage until the spouse who is taking responsibility for a problem that is not hers decides to say or do something about it.

You know, it’s the best job I’ve ever had, on its worst day it’s better than anything else, but it’s a huge amount of responsibility

And there has to be a far stronger mechanism for being able to track down people, have overstayed their visas, to have a responsibility for who they’re coming to visit or stay with.

Everybody has a responsibility for what they put out into the world.

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.