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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

" I hate everything about writing except doing it. "

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

" I have always loved radio as a medium. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" I am capable of bad taste - deliberately. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think that, as you get older, you want to be freer rather than more bound. "