I like you more than I would like to have a cigarette.

I like buying clothes, especially as I get a tax-deductible allowance.

There is some humour in 'Family Values.' I don't want everyone to think it's not going to make them laugh. But there are quite a lot of poems there that aren't funny at all.

The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.

Bloody men are like bloody buses - you wait for about a year and as soon as one approaches your stop two or three others appear.

In my case, the long gaps between my books have got quite a lot to do with lack of confidence. A lot of the time when I'm not writing I start thinking I can't do it.