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.

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 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.

Despite the continual rise of the knowledge worker over the last 60 years, we haven’t done enough to question “how we’ve always done things” and redefine effectiveness in organizations.

Seeing him jogging at the park had cracked the window so I could peek into his soul. Seeing him with his friends threw the window wide

Don't be fooled...If they gossip to you, they'll gossip about you.

Would you carry a razor, in case, just in case of depression?

The purpose of punishment is to improve those who do the punishing--that is the final recourse of those who support punishment.

God help anyone who messes with the Virals!

People who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature.

And by the right thing, I mean that whatever step we take next, the first criteria we should consider is the people who have been loyal to us, thus far, which is primarily our audience.

Being a father is just wonderful.

Music is politics - it always has been and it always will be.