When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.

I don't think of myself all the time.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.