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

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" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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 like a direct relationship between actor and audience. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "