I like buying clothes, especially as I get a tax-deductible allowance.

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 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?

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.

When a poem doesn't work, the first question to ask yourself is, 'Am I telling the truth?'

I have a theory that if you've got the kind of parents who want to send you to boarding school, you're probably better off at boarding school.

I've never been more famous than I was, suddenly, in 1986.