However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

I was always influenced by language.

Children will not pretend to be enjoying books, and they will not read books because they have been told that these books are good. They are looking for delight.

It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.

I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is.

Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.

The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.

As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister.

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.

I was grateful for the opportunity to make a difference. The political violence really started in 1970-1971. The political difficulties start a little bit beyond that.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite.

Many difficulties which nature throws in our way, may be smoothed away by the exercise of intelligence.

One of the difficulties of not knowing for so long whether we were doing a fifth season or not was that we weren't really allowed to go out shopping for work.

Commitment and co-operation to overcome barriers and difficulties, and determination to achieve the standards of the EU as well as NATO membership, are and have always been the principal target.

There is no doubt that I, also, had long been aware of the problem, i.e. producing X-ray interferences, before the inherent difficulties had finally been surmounted.

My task is becoming more and more delicate, while the difficulties increase constantly.

I think everybody had difficulties with that dynamic, turning the family into a band and being constantly together. So everybody, as individuals. had things to sort out.

A man who dreads trials and difficulties cannot become a revolutionary. If he is to become a revolutionary with an indomitable fighting spirit, he must be tempered in the arduous struggle from his youth. As the saying goes, early training means more than late earning.

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

With the club now in administration and concern about where the money for land sale has gone, I know there are huge commercial difficulties to be resolved, but I hope that football will once again become the most important issue.

When you encounter difficulties and contradictions, do not try to break them, but bend them with gentleness and time.

Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.

Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.

My difficulties belong to me!

It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes.

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.