Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."

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.

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.

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.

What can I say about Brian Williams. Nothing, because I work for NBC.

Hold loosely to the things of this life, so that if God requires them of you, it will be easy to let them go.

People may be said to resemble not the bricks of which a house is built, but the pieces of a picture puzzle, each differing in shape, but matching the rest, and thus bringing out the picture.

Growth today is an investment for tomorrow.

I was terrible at school.

No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child without a permit for parenthood.

The company must be profitable. Preferably it will have increased its earnings for the past five years and there will have been no deficits over that period.

Americans feel as though the only position they can possibly occupy is number one and if they're not number one, well, the end of the world has come.