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.

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.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

I like poems that are complex.

'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

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 don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.