“Poetry is not the most important thing in life... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.”

“The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.”

“These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't.”

“I have longed to move awayFrom the hissing of the spent lieAnd the old terrors' continual cryGrowing more terrible as the dayGoes over the hill into the deep sea;I have longed to move awayFrom the repetition of salutes,For there are ghosts in the airAnd ghostly echoes on paper,And the thunder of calls and notes.I have longed to move away but am afraid;Some life, yet unspent, might explodeOut of the old lie burning on the ground,And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.Neither by night's ancient fear,The parting of hat from hair,Pursed lips at the receiver,Shall I fall to death's feather.By these I would not care to die,Half convention and half lie.”

“In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their arms,I labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.Not for the proud man apartFrom the raging moon I writeOn these spindrift pagesNor for the towering deadWith their nightingales and psalmsBut for the lovers, their armsRound the griefs of the ages,Who pay no praise or wagesNor heed my craft or art.”

“Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud. -Dylan Thomas”

“My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.”