The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

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 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.

Music is the beat of a drum that keeps time with our emotions.

When I walk in the front door after a shift, Lucy, I want your mouth on mine before I even get my jacket off

Dreams are like over-sized clothes and shoes handed over to us by parents or older siblings

If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.

What we call conscience in many instances, is only a wholesome fear of the law.

This is something called "walking meditation." The goal is to learn to be aware of each and every movement and feeling. I know it seems ridiculous, but it does change the way you experience walking.

Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means.

All life is a boomerang. We receive what we give.

When I started Victoria Principal Products, there were 22 full-time employees - they were all women

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.