You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue.

I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all.

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.

The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

The most prosaic of us betray a belief in the inward life every time we talk about 'my body' rather than 'I.