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

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.

People who believed in God today will doubt him tomorrow and those who doubted him today will believe in him tomorrow because believing in someone else doesn't work. Believe in yourself.

There's something to be said about drinking a carafe of wine by yourself ... I just can't remember at the moment what it is! (said after drinking a carafe of wine by himself)

To be knighted, that would be amazing. I remember Alex Ferguson from Man Utd got it and Steve Redgrave - to be in the same category as them is amazing.

All the manifest forms of existence are but illusions. They are momentary displays of consciousness, flashes of lightening in the sky. They are there for a moment and then they are gone.

It is a misfortune to pass at once from observation to conclusion, and to regard both as of equal value; but it befalls many a student.

You can mythologize Steve Jobs, but really in the end, he was a kid from the Valley, with his funny little friends, and they made something. That's all he was.

When I was 5 years old, my mother read me 'Gone With The Wind' at night, before I went to bed. I remember her reading almost all year.

OK, so what's the speed of dark?

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

Facts mean nothing unless they are rightly understood, rightly related and rightly interpreted.