“Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.”

“life is first boredom, then fear.whether or not we use it, it goes,and leaves what something hidden from us chose,and age, and then the only end of age.”

“Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.”

“How hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words...)”

“I had a moral tutor, but never saw him (the only words of his I remember are 'The three pleasures of life -drinking, smoking, and masturbation')”

“I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself...”

“On me your voice falls as they say love should,Like an enormous yes.”