Peter Porter

“You can never tell when an artist really will take up someone's work and work with it happily.”

“As to whether the people who were supposedly to put up the money and did put it up or whether it was Arthur's own money is something which I shall never know.”

“I have no fondness for pure form at all.”

“I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.”

“I wanted to take a stand against what I think was not so well established then but is thoroughly well established now, which is the substitution for a real sense of a country of a hideous distortion which you can sell to the people called 'heritage'.”

“Love without sex is still the most efficient form of hell known to man.”

“In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.”