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

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" 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 am capable of bad taste - deliberately. "

" I hate everything about writing except doing it. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads 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'm not the sort of person who reads much about himself. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in 'The Gaze of the Gorgon.' "

" 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. "

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

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

" I have always loved radio as a medium. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "