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

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.

The most profound, tangible influence in my life has been my wife, Monique. I don't know that I would even be alive were it not for her, and I certainly would not be the person that I am today.

I don't know how much influence we really had, because we never put our pictures on the albums or anything and we never really promoted the Talking Heads connection, because we wanted to keep it separate from Talking Heads.

My life would have been different without Paul Stanley or Ace Frehley. They would have to be the greatest on my list as an influence to my life at 11 years old.

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

I was on Oprah's show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn't even go into my family, who had the most influence.

The most hateful human misfortune is for a wise man to have no influence.

There are a couple of teachers I have had without whose influence I would not be as happy with who I am.

It's definitely an influence, I mean how can you not say you are influenced to play rock.

When I started out, I preferred to watch my films without music, as its presence tends to mask the underlying pace of the film. I felt I could feel the rhythm of the film better without music to influence me.

The orbs create feedback loops that can influence either personal of employee behavior.

Today America lost a great elder statesman, a committed public servant, and leader of the Senate. And today I lost a treasured friend. Ted Kennedy was an iconic, larger than life United States senator whose influence cannot be overstated. Many have come before, and many will come after, but Ted Kennedy's name will always be remembered as someone who lived and breathed the United States Senate and the work completed within its chamber.

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

Whatever we do or fail to do will influence the course of history.

We influence singing but never really songwriting.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

However, it does seem now that the international community, more importantly the powers that have influence, and, even more importantly, Afghanistan's neighbors realize that it is high time that they work together, and not against one another.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where his influence stops.

To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well.

We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character.