I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.

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

When everything is for 'fun' nothing is for the good.

I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.

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.