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.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

Those who lack experience always have a lot of ideas.

I owed the greater apology, but at the same time I knew that was done was done, that no matter what I said now I would never be able to make it right.

Change occurs when one becomes what she is not when she tries to become what she is not.

The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.

You will never stop wanting more until you allow yourself to have what you already have. To take it in. Savor it. Now is a good time to do that . . .

Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.

Right now Andy Larkin is pitching just like young Andy Larkin.

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back.

Show me a man or woman with a mission, and I'll show you somebody that's tougher to beat.

I'm not messy. I'm rebelling against folding.