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I've been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I've come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

People will always blame the poets for society's ills. But these are the true artists.

The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.

I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.

I have felt at times with groups of children that I was really being what every poet would like to be - a bard in the old sense.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

I'm very proud of the fact that I'm one of Britain's biggest selling poets. That gives me a huge amount of pleasure.