"I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were."

"Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally."

"Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly."

"I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century."

"Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost."

"I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy."

"Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet."

"I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them."

"I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless."

"My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do."

"I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings."

"There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic."

"I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art."

"Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions."

"I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas."

"I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature."

"When everything is for 'fun' nothing is for the good."

"A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties."

"I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound."

"I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me."

"Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry."