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" I have always loved radio as a medium. "

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" I like a direct relationship between actor and audience. "

" 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 am capable of bad taste - deliberately. "

" 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'm hoping to have a ninth decade like Matisse's. "

" A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud. "

" I'm not the sort of person who reads much about himself. "

" Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper? "

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

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

" 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. "

" Yes, I've got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honour that as well. "

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

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

" 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 need to look back on my poetic ventures, make sense of them as a whole, and move forward... and to experiment without external demands. "

" 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. "

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

" I was brought up on music hall, and at the same time, I was studying Greek at the age of 12. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close. "

" Coming from a very inarticulate family made me try to speak for those who can't express themselves and created a need for articulation at its most ceremonial - poetry. "

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

" Theatre has to be theatrical. It has to draw attention to itself, like poetry. "