There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.

There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.

I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to go to receptions, to be seen at gatherings of the great and the good, to stand and be bored to death by men in grey suits.

Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas are overlapping and interacting as well, the emotional, intuitive, animal areas.

Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."