We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

I left school at 16 but I wish I'd gone to university - I think I would have studied English literature. I had a knack for that. But I don't think you have the kind of wisdom at 16 to make that decision.

It's received wisdom that the English are uniquely child-unfriendly.

I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.

Apart from a few simple principles the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

Until the June 1967 war I was completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English. Beginning in 1968 I started to think write and travel as someone who felt himself to be directly involved in the renaissance of Palestinian life and politics.

An English man does not travel to see English men.

Viewed freely the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect race and range of time and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it.

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.

When I was about 13 or 14 I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year's regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.

Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people I did not choose acting acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.

My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because frankly he could make more money doing that.

I had one companion. He was a teacher from the Ukraine who spoke English so we could communicate a bit. I learnt a few Russian words but it was hard to concentrate.

I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side. When I got to college as I was walking across campus one day I ripped off a little flyer for this sketch-comedy group. It ended up being one of the greatest things I've ever done.

Ironically for a few million people in the Far East I did become an English teacher through my music.

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

I didn't want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law so I didn't go into acting when I got to the States. I thought 'No I'll go to school and then I'll be an English teacher that'll be fun.' But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried I just couldn't inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

In my teens I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

I made my drama teacher cry. I only took drama to get out of writing papers in English and the teacher was this thespian Broadway geek and here I was this Italian guy from Staten Island and I would put her in tears.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

A friend of mine said no matter what I do I always look like an English teacher. She actually said you still look like a Campbell's Soup kid.

I dropped out of high school when I was 16 after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word 'existentialism.'