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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 like a direct relationship between actor and audience. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I have always loved radio as a medium. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I hate everything about writing except doing it. "

" 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. "

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