I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. - Maxine Kumin

I am a poet who is a woman, not a woman poet. - Ruth Fainlight

It is not so difficult to kindle the poetic fire in the first place as to keep it going, hot and bright, through a whole lifetime. - Thom Gunn

Finely wrought verse that is tough, but also lyrical. A distinctive new voice - Neil Rollinson

But the exact place where the self and the other touch, where there's the possibility of either transformation or stasis...that's the place that interests me most. - Jo Shapcott

Sometimes, in poems, I am only dimly conscious of the grounds of my activity, and the work proceeds to its own law and discipline, with me as a go-between, as it were. - Harold Pinter

The writer today should be not so much the mouthpiece of a community...as its conscience, its critical faculty, its generous instinct. - Louis MacNeice

What happens with me is quite often I start with a memory, mix it with observations of people I know and then mix in a bit of 'What if...?' - Michael Rosen

Who says the world is not a wedding? - 'O Taste and See', Dannie Abse

Hers is a daybook of a night-nurse of the soul - John Mole, 'Encounter'

The really basic thing as far as I'm concerned is the pens. I have three pens; I keep them in my left hand pocket, and they're always there because if I haven't got a pen I'm really lost... - U. A. Fanthorpe