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I have always found language to be intensely real, books more convincing than films or that wretched medium, TV. From childhood I set out in an armada of puns, ditties jokes, gags and creative mistakes. Everything was hooked onto language, even the most wonderful visual memories. Hence my liking for Kipling, S.J. Perelman, Empson

Sculpture, team sports, the leaves of trees, flowers and clouds. I'm not mad about animals, except for dogs with their historically rich cultural personalities. I'm crazy about ancient history. And keen on keeping fit. Red wine and cold showers, that's the regimen.

T-shirt, shorts and bare feet, the language of summer. And I never wear a tie. At heart, I'm a beach person -- and a city-dweller. Jeans are the great common idiom of our time, of that i am convinced.

I belong to the Piero dello della Francesca generation; his "Baptism of Christ" in London is immensely rich and serene, his "Flagellation of Christ" most mysterious; but the more turbulent riches of van Gogh's landscapes also move me deeply. Like everyone, I am moved by a kind of pefection in Vermeer. The painter who most affected my poetry was that great devourer of landscapes, Turner: the one who most influences my own drawing, Gorky. I am deeply hostile to any kind of work that is reductive or minimal, though I'm oddly attracted to Cy Twombly. And I admire the intellectual power of Cezanne's still lives. At some, hard to define, level all art is surely religious. Which isn't to rule our pleasure to be had from the playfulness of Klee, Hockney, John Brack. Other Australian painters? Olsen, Fairweather, Cossington Smith, Yvonne Audette - and Streeton, of course: his early work was brilliant. At the present I'm having my portrait painted by Kristin Headlam, and I'm very pleased about that. Some calmer painters, like Velasquez, Godfrey Miller, Roland Wakelin (Bacon's opposites; very un-Booth) are coming into the picture. And then there is the lyrical purity of Giorgio Morandi: art as sheer contemplative peace.

Genesis, 1, has always intrigued me. But there are dozens of parts of the Bible which haunt and beguile me: the beginning of John, "The Song of Songs", Peter and the crowing of the cock, the road to Emmaus, first Corinthians. The Book is deep in my bones, for all that I am not Christian, but an imprecise deist.

Either Stendhal or Keats. Both understood and testified to the volatility of self, and awareness which underlay their witty quickness. My father put me onto Stendhal, whereas I found Keats at school and have never abondoned him in all these years. I'd love to have met Elizabeth Bishop. Among living writers, Seamus Heaney is a richly giving and seriously humorous man, for whom i have a great affection. But I began with Kipling and R.L. Stevenson, both of whom gave me at different stages both verse and prose. In adolescence I went on to American comic prose: I read the whole of a collected Mark Twain, then H. Allen Smith and the exuberant S.J. Perelman. Comedy has always been a source of great joy to me. From Gaia's point of view, tragedy is no more than comedy plucked unripe. I'd quite like to spend my days playing tennis, surfing, doing a bit of drawing, and reading Keats, Randall Jarrell, Iris Murdoch and, of course, Proust (the perfect Australian author, I once claimed!)