“And if they're fictional, it is entirely acceptable to cheat on fictional men with other fictional men.”

“I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.”

“Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.”

“In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.”

“THE MEETING""Scant rain had fallen and the summer sunHad scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn,That August nightfall, as I crossed the downWork-weary, half in dream. Beside a fenceSkirting a penning’s edge, an old man waitedMotionless in the mist, with downcast headAnd clothing weather-worn. I asked his nameAnd why he lingered at so lonely a place.“I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasonsI roamed these windswept downlands with my flock.No fences barred our progress and we’d travelWherever the bite grew deep. In summer droughtI’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-topTo find a missing straggler or set snaresBy wood or turmon-patch. In gales of MarchI’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs.“I was a ploughman, too. Year upon yearI trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts,Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead,Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a songOf lark and pewit melodied my toil.I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawnTo groom and dress my team: by daylight’s endMy boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint.“And then I was a carter. With my skillI built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hayFrom the dense-matted rick. At harvest time,My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horsesBack to the master’s barn with shouts and cursesBefore the scurrying storm. Through sunlit daysOn this same slope where you now stand, my friend,I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields.“My cob-built home has crumbled. HereaboutsFew folk remember me: and though you stareTill time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me stridingThe broad, bare down with flock or toiling team.Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers:Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble,On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur,In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.”My comrade turned aside. From the damp swardDrifted a scent of melilot and thyme;From far across the down a barn owl shouted,Circling the silence of that summer evening:But in an instant, as I stepped towards himStriving to view his face, his contour altered.Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stoodNothing of flesh, only a post of wood.”

“Competition isn't a bad thing. Somebody can always do it better and that somebody is you.”

“we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.”