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Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

I am also well aware that literature only has a minimal influence on political disputes or economic crises in the world, but its significance to human beings is ancient.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

'In the Cut' was not what readers expected of me. Before it was published, I was seen as a women's writer, which meant that I wrote movingly about flowers and children.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.