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

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" 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 like a direct relationship between actor and audience. "

" 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 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 am capable of bad taste - deliberately. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I have always loved radio as a medium. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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