We lie on love's breath - Jan Kemp, 'Puriri'

I try to honor my reader's patience and generosity by presenting what I have to say as clearly and succinctly as possible. - Ted Kooser

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

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

...the communication of the dead/is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. - from Part 1 of 'Little Gidding', T. S. Eliot

I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems. - Larkin to his publisher

the patron saint of poetry - Carol Ann Duffy

And here is love / like a tinsmith's scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin - 'Mossbawn Sunlight', Seamus Heaney

...anything I have seen, I've only seen by virtue of having been very inattentive or rebellious at school, and looking at what was out of the corner of the picture, what was outside the frame. - Roy Fisher

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

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

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