Unless you are completely retired, earning money is the best form of wealth preservation.
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.
The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.
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.
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.
I hear poets complaining: 'We face what our forebears did not face. We face TV. We face radio. We face this and that.'
The problem with rich lists is... it is impossible to know what someone is worth until they have died and you have sold it.
Money is power. Power is an aphrodisiac.
I have one talent, and that's figuring out what people want about two minutes before they know it themselves.
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.
The climate has been changing since there was a climate.
It's kind of a crazy thing to decide that you're going to be worth tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars and set out to do that. It doesn't suit everybody.
I couldn't care less what anyone's 'perception' of me is. I'm too long in the tooth to care.
You shouldn't go around the world behaving ruthlessly when you don't have to. Sometimes you do have to. There is only so much pie to go around. If you're going to take more than your fair share of pie, as socialists would look at it, then someone else is not getting his. That means you've got to take it away from them.
With the greatest of respect, I have watched Apple from the day it started. I was publishing magazines about the Apple II before most people had ever heard what a personal computer was.
I'm very proud of the fact that I'm one of Britain's biggest selling poets. That gives me a huge amount of pleasure.
'The Week' is my favourite magazine. Everyone from presidents to CEOs of companies love it, politicians, people in the massive charity business in America, in the arts and even more especially in the media.
You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.
The age of celebrity editors and monstrous staffing are over.
