I wish I was away in Ingo Far across the briny sea Sailing over deepest waters Where neither care nor worry trouble me.
Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away.
A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.
Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.
Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. It’s a nice feeling, and you don’t want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.
If the garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected light of roadside snow.
The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.
Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.
For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister.
Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country.
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.
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.
If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.
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.
My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.
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.
I was always influenced by language.