When I was 18 years old I went to Shakespeare Company, the school, and I wrote a poem about my leaves - I felt like a tree that had no leaves. That is the life at 18.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.
I'm not that old, and I haven't lived a life so far from the ordinary, really.
When I was 21, I got into a motorcycle accident while traveling in Europe and I had to lie around a lot in the aftermath, which was really the first time in my life that I became really focused and inspired to write.
I was already devouring literature and I was the ripe old age of 15 when I decided to be an actor. I just thought plays were the most fantastic way of expressing life. I thought I'd discovered Shakespeare - 'hey, there's a new guy in town, don't know if anyone's read him.' I was just excited about the whole thing, from day one.
It's odd to think of yourself as an orphan at 55.
The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
At the age of seventeen, I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetry in a room in a flat at the edge of the city.
From age 16, I lived and breathed wine. I read every magazine and book about wine.