We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

I was delighted with the film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth]; it almost made me want to be a film-maker!

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

After everything that's happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.

Plague has hung over human history. The biggest human extinction was after 1492 in North and South America when the mortality rate was 95 per cent, which is enormous. But again, I'm actually giving you grounds for optimism: There were enough to continue. The five per cent who made it through are what you need to survive a bottleneck, which we have been through before.