It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

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.

Nothing is impossible if someone make it possible.

The less you can afford for your frocks, the more care you must take with your accessories

Whatever men live for, today most live only because of the market order.

The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself.

Baptize the nations! far and nigh,The triumphs of the cross recordThe name of Jesus glorify,Till every people call Him Lord.

If I had done what I was programmed to do, I would now be sitting in a car factory looking at the sizes of wheels, or wondering how to get credit to start a new factory in Russia.

What's the whole point of being pretty on the outside when you're so ugly on the inside?

The thing that I champion is sustainability. My terror is that suddenly we see it as a luxury, not an essential. That's a danger.

When I visited concentration camps, I was more interested in how people responded to the camps than in the actual places. I watched kids picnicking on the ovens and other people stricken with grief.

By nature all people are alike, but by education become different