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Once I discovered how important writing music was to me and just what a huge weight it lifted off of me, I knew that it was going to be the biggest part of my life, the biggest love of my life, the biggest thing in my life.

Music was very influential on me as a kid.

Music was something I was encouraged to do, which I appeared to be quite good at, but it was never a passion. Writing was always my first love.

Music - which I could never listen to while writing before I had children - became essential to my process.

My entire life has really revolved around music that was written about the time that I was born, 1908, to just before the First World War and shortly after it. This music I've always known, and it is that music that's most important to me.

Growing up, music was an important part of my childhood. I see it being just as important in my children and all children's growth and development, and in a parent's connection with their children.

Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.

I just discovered when I was, oh, 12 or 13, that I was very interested in language - and this showed itself as poetry. There was no looking back.

Earlier in my life, I performed a lot of music. Some of it because I felt it was a demonstration, or a representation of certain intellectual concepts that were very exciting and important.

I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.