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

There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

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

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

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