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

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.

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.

The will is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame man who can see.

I am very glad indeed to see you to-night, and yet I will not say I thank you for this call, but I do most sincerely thank Almighty God for the occasion on which you have called.

The great lesson my mother and father gave me was almost invisible. It was a strong sense of being rooted.

In America, we have a depleted military. It has to be helped, has to be fixed.

So like what I want to do is connect all of my albums and make it tell a bigger kind of story. So the first album is very focused on her family life and her love life.

Being a sci-fi geek, it was just lovely to be on a show where I pretend I'm in outer space. That's always been my dream: to pretend to be out in space or actually be out in space.

Happiness is this place that, once you arrive there, you have nothing else to do. You get bored. Passion is this up and down; it's like a rollercoaster, you know, and much more interesting to me.

Being here feels like I'm out of prison. This is the right place, the right time, the right team.

By honoring the lives of those we admire, we make our own values known.

Stale artifacts of the past' are always 'active components of the present moment' when they are experienced in the present moment.