I hardly ever look at my published books.

There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.

I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."

I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.

I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.

A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.

Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

For me the form, the stanzaic shape, is an endorsement, proof that I'm engaged with the Latin or Greek at an original level, that my versions are explorations.

I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to tinker - I'm more likely to destroy.

Trees generously share their fruit.Bees generously share their honey.Flowers generously share their perfume. Do likewise.

He gives new meaning to the word bombed.

Women carry a beautiful hand with them to the grave, when a beautiful face has long ago vanished.

I think I've ignored it so much so that when the paparazzi are following me I really don't see them. You don't see them anymore.

Pigs may not be as cuddly as kittens or puppies, but they suffer just as much.

Because you want to keep an air of calm and cool.

Character is what emerges from all the little things you were too busy to do yesterday, but did anyway.

Go early to bed. Start maybe working out a little sooner. Stay patient. Stop smoking.

There's no place like home. And there's no toilet like your own.

There's no better sign of a brave mind than a hard hand.