I write in that space between Ella's childhood and mine. I know it all sounds a bit sinister.

I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety.

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.

Between 9am and 3pm is when I work most intensely.

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas, and there's no way I'd do anything to undermine that belief.

My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy.

I write in that space between Ella's childhood and mine. I know it all sounds a bit sinister.

Every day is a gift with a child, no matter what problems you have.

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.

Edinburgh is my favourite city. We'll be doing a lot of children's theatre and galleries.

Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.

When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.

If I felt, in the event of a royal wedding, inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I would just be grateful to have an idea for the poem. And if I didn't, I'd ignore it.

If we think of what's up ahead, with climate change and wars over water, it's very frightening.

The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.

The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

Bees are the batteries of orchards gardens guard them.

A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I don't carry any early childhood trauma around with me, if that's what you're hinting at. The story of the bicycles - and there were three of them which were stolen from me - I've dealt with it well.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

I had a kind of Dickensian childhood.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

I didn't have a happy childhood.

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

My whole family actually, but my parents. I had such a normal and amazing childhood. I've been so lucky. My parents are cool and normal. They don't talk about the business and I still have stuff to do at their house.

From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.