Carol Ann Duffy Quotes

I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we will become.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.

Poetry, above all is a series of intense moments ­ its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas and there's no way I'd do anything to undermine that belief.

When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.

Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.

What will you do now with the gift of your left life?

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal

My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.

She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale which balanced poetry and prayer.

I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety.

I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.

Poets sing our human music for us.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I always wanted a child. Being a mother is the central thing in my life.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems

I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales

The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

Time hates love, wants love poor,/but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw.

If we think of what's up ahead, with climate change and wars over water, it's very frightening.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.

Having a child takes you back to all those parts of your own childhood that you had hidden away.

Every day is a gift with a child, no matter what problems you have.

Between 9am and 3pm is when I work most intensely

How would you prepare to die on a perfect April evening?

I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.

The stars are filming us for no one.

What do I haveto help me, without spell or prayer,endure this hour, endless, heartless, anonymous,the death of love?

Better off dead than giving in; not taking what you want.

You have me like a drawing, erased, coloured in, untitled, signed by your tongue.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas, and there's no way I'd do anything to undermine that belief.

But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wifewhich made me worse. I howled in my cell.If the Devil is gone then how could this be hell?

I'm not the first or the lastto stand on a hillock, watching the man she marriedprove to the worldhe's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pi

Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.

Then he started his period.One week in bed.Two doctors in.Three painkillers four times a day.And later a letter to the powers-that-bedemanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks per year.