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.

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.

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

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

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.

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.

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.

Despite how lonely or broken down you might feel, we need you with us helping to make the world better, kinder and safer, especially for the little girls coming up.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

When they say you're the best, I always remember that the majority of the audience probably thinks someone else should have gotten the award.

Every potter praises his own pot.

Time is made up of various ages; and each thinks its own a novelty.

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

You can't pick when you're touched. You can't pick the time. It just is. It's the reality. What it is, is. I can't change the past. I can only deal with the present and the future.

I used to work as a proofreader at Merrill Lynch.

Real love is love for love's sake. I do not ask health or money or life or salvation.