I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.

In my case, the long gaps between my books have got quite a lot to do with lack of confidence. A lot of the time when I'm not writing I start thinking I can't do it.

I've said what I'm prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you're going to tell them a whole lot more.

Bloody men are like bloody buses - you wait for about a year and as soon as one approaches your stop two or three others appear.

I was single for a long time and felt very much alone in the world, and talk of family values upset me very much at that phase in my life, because I used to think: 'What about people like me?

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.

The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it.