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

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.

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.

I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.

they were in love with apocalypse, like all men, more in love with myths than with any woman.

As long as you are the owner (‘I am Chandubhai and all this is mine’), the worldly life remains. When does the ownership go away? When the wrong belief goes away.

Someone is assigned to not only hear your heart's song but will strum your heart strings melodically. Listen with your heart.

My becoming an actor wasn't planned. My interest always lied in sports such as football, martial arts, gymnastics and dance.

Should a small business or a large business be able to pollute the water or the air or the food? No, I hope you don't believe that.

Nonsense, do you imagine he has thought as much of you as you have of him?

When you seek to dominate another you dominate no one but disempower yourself.

Remember the words of Chairman Mao: 'It's always darkest before it's totally black.'.

Five runs ahead and he'd knock in all the runs I could ask for. One run behind and he was going to kill me.

And an equation is the same whether it's written in red or green ink