Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.

I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans. ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy.

I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.