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" I believe more in the power of drama than in the power of religion. "

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" I spent a lot of time on recce. It is a kind of creative chaos, but I like the sense of creative serendipity. "

" Looking back, fire images have been constant in my poetry. As a boy, it was my job to light the fire each morning, and I remember the celebratory bonfires at the end of the war. It was from staring into fire that I began my first poetry. "

" The ear will surrender even at those times when the eye wants to close, when the eye doesn't want to watch. "

" I'd rather climb Everest than go for a walk in the park. "

" I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. 'Poet' covers it all for me. "

" I've realised darkness and light are inter-dependent, just as death is an enhancer of life. "

" It is always better to write for the whole of society than for the poetry-reading public. "

" I really admire the great Japanese artists who could change their name three times in a lifetime. You could get rid of one and renew yourself. "

" I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to. "

" Honours seem to be the nature of British life. It's horrible. Maybe I'm mad, but the older I get, the less I want to have honours loaded on me. "

" I often find myself quoting from Victor Hugo after one of my theatrical ventures. 'Now that my play is a failure,' he once said, 'I find I love it all the more.' I first quoted that after 'Square Rounds' at the Olivier in 1992. "

" I have always loved radio as a medium. "

" Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV. "

" I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet. "

" You litter poems with too much learning when you're younger. "

" I've written on public matters, but I don't understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals... anybody who knew my work would know I'm not a contender. "

" The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets. "

" I love being on the road with others, with a camera, but also being alone writing poetry. "

" Of course you have to provide for the vulnerable and the children, but also, the vulnerable and the children need art in some form or another. You need spiritual experiences that, I think, forms of art give best. "

" I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section. "

" For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect. "

" It's been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century. "

" A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it. "

" You get early inoculation against the idea of success if you're a poet. When I published my first collection of sonnets, I sold about five copies; now kids study them for A level. Wanting to be successful in that other world of money or fame is not interesting. Poetry isn't like that, and it never has been. "

" I hate the anglicanisation of culture, the idea that culture is genteel. It's not genteel. "

" The imagination has its limits, and you have to face up to that. "

" You can make poems out of anger as well as tenderness. You can make poetry out of anything. It can be the ugliest of emotions. It doesn't have to be sweetness and light. "

" I hate everything about writing except doing it. "

" One of the important things about familiar form and metricality is that it draws attention to the physical nature of language: the spell-binding nature of it and the ceremony of articulation. "

" I think it's the tendency to want to create gods and monotheistic absolutes and absolute certainties that is the continual temptation in human thought - that's the great danger. Every time we create a god, we diminish humanity. "