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

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.

I'd like to do voiceovers my whole life. I get to kind of create a character and go in and play.

I'm a sort of boy next door. If that boy has a good scriptwriter.

Faith is a recognition of those things which are above the sense.

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

Unless your name is GOOGLE, Don`t act as if you know everything.

I have crazy claustrophobic dreams, weird elevator dreams where the elevator closes in and all of a sudden I am lying down - oh my God, it's a casket. Just freaky stuff like that.

What a lot of people don't realise is that damage to hair starts from washing your hair in a rush and not taking all the product out such as leave-in conditioners. So I always make sure that I cleanse my hair properly and get the shampoo and conditioner completely out.

People aren't used to thinking of cultural forms spreading out across the full range of formal interactions - or what is called the "text" in literary terms.

Rivalry is the life of trade, and the death of the trader.

The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.

There are three needs of the griever: To find the words for the loss, to say the words aloud and to know that the words have been heard.

Our parents have, by far, the greatest influence on shaping who we are and how we deal with the world.

There's no shame in owning a New Kids on the Block t-shirt. They were my first concert when I was eight.

I will support the Republican nominee. I don't think that's going to be Donald Trump. My party has historically nominated someone who's a mainstream conservative.

If thou art a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf.

The top salesperson in the organization probably missed more sales than 90% of the sales people on the team, but they also made more calls than the others made.

Clothes were terribly important in the '20s. They really were an arbiter of who you were and how much money you had: an indicator of social status.

I try to give the media as many confusing images as I can to retain my freedom. What's real is for my children and the people I live with.

I don't feel that I was often compartmentalized as an African-American actor, yet I am fully aware of the plight that actors, directors and producers of color face in our industry. I choose to focus on being proactive in creating opportunities for myself and others while acknowledging that we are not playing on a level playing field.

It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine.