...as both poet and translator he has succeeded over many decades in placing the best silences in the best order. - Dennis O'Driscoll

A writer is not interested in explaining reality; he's interested in capturing it. - Brendan Kennelly

My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, educated and manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primaeval swamp. - Andrew Motion

A true poem is dreamed and danced as well as thought. - Les Murray

Poetry's only obligation is to the truth. Whether this truth is widely popular or not is irrelevant. It should be the best truth possible and that is the only quality that gives it any hope of survival. - George Szirtes

I do mock literature and take it seriously at the same time, but anyone who is passionately attached to a football team will have similar mixed feelings - Ian Duhig

Go for it, petal. Nothing's as real as what you write. (from Writing to Onegin, Ruth Padel)

wen yuh see she walk//holdin freedom water//balance pon she head - 'caribbean woman', Jean 'Binta' Breeze

For me, poetry is very much the time that it takes to unroll, the way music does...it's not a static, contemplatable thing like a painting or a piece of sculpture. - John Ashbery

With a lyric poem, you look, and meditate, and put the rock back. With fiction you poke things with a stick to see what will happen. - Margaret Atwood

I've always been concerned to get into [my poetry] the details of daily living which portray - or betray - human strengths and weaknesses and oddities. - Alan Brownjohn

As a new empire swells into the full glare of the global limelight, its novelists and balladeers could very well take a good lesson from Enright: Look long and hard. Write clearly. And keep it sharp. - James Norton, Flakmag