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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "