I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.

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.

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

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.

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.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned.

Love is you. Love is calling you. Life is awaiting you. Go forth and live fully. Be whomever you are. Define you.

My inspiration comes from that and so I wrote ‘Killing Jesus,’ because I think I was directed to write that.

I take pride in never being rude to anyone on this earth, which contains a great number of unbearable villains who set upon you to recount their sufferings and even recite their poems.

I flash him number seventeen of my thirty-five Looks of Death.

Women want certain things in marriage--the right to a title and a front seat in the lap of luxury.

Then I realized that to be really good at this requires a lot of energy and concentration and skill.

I feel I belong in the movie business and I belong in the security business. It's a natural for me.

Me, myself, personally, I like to keep myself private. I have never said I am a paragon of virtue, a model of morality. I simply do what I do.

I wish I was as sure about things as Bill Monroe was sure about things.