We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.

The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.

My mother married again after my father's death - another Royal Air Force officer, and a very different kind of man. We went to Australia when I was eight or nine. We lived there for a couple of years, and then came back and lived in North Wales for the whole of my teenage years... I learned how to write poems quite a lot. I just had a good time reading and reading and reading. So that's where I did most of my growing up.

Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.