I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

Don’t put your wand there, boy! ... Better wizards than you have lost buttocks, you know!

This life is a process of learning.

After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

The first year I was on the show, it took an interviewer about 45 minutes to get it out of me that I even had a dog, and even then I wouldn't tell him the dog's name.

Foolishness and criticism are so apt, do so naturally go together!

One of the greatest satisfactions one can ever have, comes from the knowledge that he can do some one thing superlatively well.

You don't love someone out of loyalty... nor out of sympathy, either.

I just want silence... Jesus, it doesn't mean I don't like you. It just means right now, I like silence more.

The contradictions the mind comes up against, these are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.

I like playing flawed characters, people who aren't perfect.