Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

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.

A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man

What lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.

Love deep is inexhaustible like a vast ocean.

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

If you lack vulnerability then you are not being truthful to yourself.

Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the Universe to make sense!

We said we'd never tour ... and we'll never do a tour, I don't think - or if we do it won't be longer than about two weeks.

Two people cannot be alone together for upwards of half an hour without one emerging as the superior.

What the polls don't tell you is, though other polls do, is that if you do a study of CEOs, top executives in corporations, they're liberal.

Always, Sir, set a high value on spontaneous kindness.