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

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.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

My workout is my meditation.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

Meditation is the life of the soul: Action, the soul of meditation. and honor the reward of action.

I mean the whole thing about meditation and yoga is about connecting to the higher part of yourself, and then seeing that every living thing is connected in some way.

If you are doing mindfulness meditation, you are doing it with your ability to attend to the moment.

Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.

When you cease from labour, fill up your time in reading, meditation, and prayer: and while your hands are labouring, let your heart be employed, as much as possible, in divine thoughts.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation the source of strength is one's self. When one prays he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.

The more intense the nature of a man, the more readily will he find meditation, and the more successfully will he practice it.

Recovering from the suicide of a loved one, you need all the help you can get, so I very much recommend a meditation program. The whole picture of how to recover from this has to do with body, mind, and spirit. That's applicable to any kind of depression.

The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

We tend to think of meditation in only one way. But life itself is a meditation.

I get into certain yoga positions at times, when I'm working out and for exercises. I use a little of it in some of my meditation, but I chant now and that sort of replaced it.

I am calling attention just to the main points of these tremendously important matters, which can be understood better by pious meditation than explained by human language.

Through meditation and by giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.

Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.