'here I am, on the edge of animation, / a dream, a dance, a fantastic construction'. Moniza Alvi

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. - W. H. Auden

Poetry Is Music From The Place You Are Born – Unknown

His poems are direct and arresting, playful, full of startling imagery, and are hilarious, passionate and erotic as often as they are political - often managing to be all these things at once - Maura Dooley

We must travel in the direction of our fear. - John Berryman

I would have words as tenacious as mules/ to bear us, sure-footed/ up the mountain of night... from 'Elemental' by Edward Baugh

A poem comes to be written ... when a certain phrase occurs to the poet and seems to touch off a whole train of ideas and associations and as it were fuse them together. - Charles Brasch

A thousand martyrs I have made, all sacrificed to my desire. - Aphra Behn 'A Thousand Martyrs'

When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.' - Hilaire Belloc

And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,/Young, heroic, mild;/And some incurable, twisted,/Shrieking, dumb, defiled. - 'Can You Remember?, Edmund Blunden

The kind of poetry that excites me is the kind that comes closest to direct communication, the kind of communication that one can sometimes feel without words in a look or a gesture. - Edwin Brock

Compose aloud; poetry is sound. - Advice to young poets, Basil Bunting