Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987