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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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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 am capable of bad taste - deliberately. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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