I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

There's simply too much fuss about myself.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

A lot of people seem to want to make the institution of marriage substitute for a real relationship.

Love means being happy, and it is that magical feeling which you get around people you love. Be it friends, family. It could mean different to different people, but to me, it is just being kind and happy with each other.

I moved to New York in 1980, and I met Beth Henley, who's a marvellous playwright and who I have a real personal and professional association with, in 1982. I met her in a stalled elevator - we were the only two people in there - and she's been one of my very dearest friends since.

There is no friendship out there. When you race, you have to fight. That's it.