I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'

You cannot properly bring up children when you are 69 or 70 and they are 12 and at the height of their madness. You can physically do it, but I don't think it's morally justified.

I have one talent, and that's figuring out what people want about two minutes before they know it themselves.

Good ideas are like Nike sports shoes. They may facilitate success for an athlete who possesses them, but on their own they are nothing but an overpriced pair of sneakers. Sports shoes don't win races. Athletes do.

People really do not have time to read all the newspapers in the world and all the sites that we now commonly use on the web. There is no possibility of keeping up.

Unless you are completely retired, earning money is the best form of wealth preservation.

I should have liked to get married, but over many decades I have lived essentially alone. I go to sleep when I'm tired, get up when I wake up, have my food prepared when I'm hungry. I can't bear the thought that I'd have to coincide, make an effort.

There are far too many people in university in Britain. If you want to make money, be a plumber.

America is an empire. I hope you know that now. All empires, by definition, are bumbling, shambolic, bullying, bureaucratic affairs, as certain of the rightness of their cause in infancy, as they are corrupted by power in their dotage.

I think having a great idea is vastly overrated. I know it sounds kind of crazy and counterintuitive. I don't think it matters what the idea is, almost. You need great execution.

What is negotiation but the accumulation of small lies leading to advantage?

Obviously, waste disposal is an enormous and fantastic industry.

The planet doesn't require saving, and actually hasn't asked Greenpeace to save it.

Overhead will eat you alive if not constantly viewed as a parasite to be exterminated. Never mind the bleating of those you employ. Hold out until mutiny is imminent before employing even a single additional member of staff. More startups are wrecked by overstaffing than by any other cause, bar failure to monitor cash flow.

Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.

With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?

The rich are not a contented tribe. The demands from others to share their wealth become so tiresome, so insistent, they often decide they must insulate themselves. Insulation eventually breeds a mild form of paranoia.

Money is power. Power is an aphrodisiac.

America, ladies and gentlemen, has done more for me financially than Britain ever has, or ever could have done.

'Great Expectations' has been described as 'Dickens's harshest indictment of society.' Which it is. After all, it's about money. About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money.

When I see something that's wrong, I just speak and act first and I'll take the consequences later.

As with the onset of sudden celebrity, for the newly rich, the world often becomes a darker, narrower, less generous place; a paradox that elicits scant sympathy, but is nonetheless true.

When you're writing, you're in a totally different zone... I can start a difficult poem and look up at the clock and see to my astonishment that three hours have passed.

You can collect all the plastic bottle caps you want as long as you give me the money so we can get off this death trap, find somewhere else and have tremendous fun screwing that up as well.