I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.

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.

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

I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Have you ever heard of a pianist who never had to practice - or of an architect who didn't bother to find out why buildings stand up?

Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.

Writing in a strict form can surprise you.

The sea is as near as we come to another world.

I'm kind of a grandma, so I like cooking for my boyfriend and watching a movie. I cook a lot, actually. I'll make bacon-wrapped asparagus, steak, and pesto pasta with chicken...but we go out to dinner a fair amount, too.

If you did the same thing you did yesterday as you did today as you will do tomorrow, what have you done? The same thing.

Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.

If you don't want to have your private life splashed everywhere, why go to the restaurants and the places you know you're going to be photographed?

Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.

Like Gandhi, my husband had struggled with the issue of materialism.

You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don't know what I want. I don't want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.

I happen to have worked with male directors who don't understand women at all. Not at all. I'm flabbergasted by their ignorance.

People should never apologize for who they are, and they should never hide who they are. Hating yourself is so 2011.

In performance, you don't always feel that sort of family bond right off the top. It sort of develops and grows over time.

If it's a good cause, I'll play just about anything.

What we are going to offer is not a one-way communication, but one-to-one communication.

As a precious metal, silver is also money.

We are apt to love praise, but not deserve it. But if we would deserve it, we must love virtue more than that.

I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me.

Composing music is hard work.

I actually think of myself as quite a shy person, although I know I give the impression of someone much more confident. I think what I do have is a capacity to listen to the other, even if the other is an opponent. That leads, in all senses of the word, to an engagement.

The bracelet says 'Fear Nothing.' It was given to me by my friends, and it was made for me and my friends during the period of time that I was going through chemotherapy. And I still wear it, because it's a great reminder of friendship and how my buddies and others came together in my time of need.

Anybody who believes and experiences their life and doesn't have shades of gray in it doesn't live where I live and is simply not in touch with the reality of the human condition.

Sometimes the wheels of justice grind slowly.

I love the Greeks. There's no messing around - it's all do or die with them.