A good-tasting homemade stew of angel and beast. - Charles Simic

I, too, sing America. - 'I, Too', Langston Hughes

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

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

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

I want that next poem. To get it I'll shed my skin, I'll lose my name, pretend I have no history, be history's fool, become elemental, all of these, none of these. - Fred D'Aguiar