Quotes by Andrew Motion

“Each sudden gust of light explains itselfas flames, but neither they, nor even bombs redoubled on the hills tonight can quite include me in their fear (Leaving Belfast)”

“It is extremely desolating news that he should have died when he was only 68 and always seemed so much younger,”

“He was a man of immense charm, affability and kindness with no side to him.”

“This is a book written by someone obsessed, stricken and deeply loving. There is nothing like it in literature.”

“The readings are at once instant in their appeal, and lingering in their impact.”

“Actors may (or may not) read poems well, but poets have unique rights to their work, and unique insights and interests to offer as we hear their idiom, pacing, tone and emphases,”

“Broodingly suggestive of Donnes intellectual figure as well as his witty sensuality, it is also a picture of great intrinsic beauty and the bewitching evocation of an age. The National Portrait Gallery is its natural home. The picture is cheap at the price, and if we dont buy it someone else will.”

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.

... each of us describes our existence by means of objects which are indifferent to us, which survive us, and which are then thrown back into the common stock from which they are soon gathered again and ascribed other roles in other circumstances.

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I dont make enough money.

I deeply adored my mum. She was an extraordinary person, even for the prejudice Im likely to have. She was beautiful, amusing, a tremendous elaborator of things into comic proportions and extravagant in her imagination.

Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - its just that Im one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.

Im not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

I wish Id been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. Its in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what its doing, which dries up the poetry.

In a general way, I want to be a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, theres been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

“Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.”