I like to think that I'm giving a voice to the silenced.

There's the space that you soar into, the space that you sometimes break through to, and hang in. A sort of gasp or gap.

If I knew how to say it directly, I would not need to write poetry. I would just talk to people and be happy.

All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face.

I feel much safer faced with a blank sheet of paper than I do with a real person.

An audience sabotages my freedom, devastates my innocence, corrupts my integrity, inhibits my great joy - and of course gives me further to fall.

Poetry is a big space and I love it.

When I was first published it was like having people rushing in coming to find out where I was hiding. Scary!

Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession.

I'm not so sure that the value of art is all it is cracked up to be.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself

She feels the anger quiet into a briny resentment. The bitterness floats like an inkblot in her mind’s eye.

If I want religion, I know where to look for it - and if for example I don't want it, then why should it be forced on me in media and public spaces?

Live with no time out.

That's great. They should put the hole in the fairway.

I don't know why that is, but English politics is just so overly white. It's very much about the class structure.

I'm fascinated by diamonds. When I put diamonds on, my hands start to shake.

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

Too much reality can be a dazzle, a surfeit;Too close immediacy an exhaustion