Metaphor is embodied in language.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names.

Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

Everything we do has consequences.

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

I was given talent, and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it.

It is a dangerous thing to have instant access to your emotions.

The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself.

The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.

I have been aware, from the age of 6, that I had talent.

Religion, you can't a handle on it, you just have to know or not know-people either believe or they don't believe.

The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination.

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

As adults, we do know more, but we don't know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

Therapy, as opposed to analysis, is a whole construct of myth, beautiful and creative.

As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.

You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.

People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses.

To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there.

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Music is the soul of language.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.