- Both suicide and divorce are very public admissions of failure. But the difference is that you have to live through your divorce.
- [on his relationship with Sylvia Plath] My listening to her poems and encouraging her did nothing to alleviate her terrible loneliness and despair. She also needed someone to take care of her and that was not a role I could fill. I loved Sylvia in the way I love other friends - for her intelligence, her liveliness and the pleasure of her company, and for the disinterested passion for poetry which we shared. But my own life was a mess back then and I was neither willing nor tough enough to shoulder her despair. In the end, like everyone else, I let her down. All I can plead in my defence is that, since her death, I have done my best to show that what she wrote matters a great deal more than how she died.
- There was more life and liveliness and appetite in Plath writing about death than there is in the collected works of Philip Larkin writing about what a bitch it is to be alive.
- Bodily decrepitude is the end of wisdom, the end of curiosity, the end of energy, intellectual as well as physical, the end of appetite and delight. Bodily decrepitude is a prison ... with a boring and vindictive jailer who happens to be yourself.
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