“I came to explore the wreck.”

If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

Life on the planet is born of woman.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Any woman’s death diminishes me.

That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.

There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.

Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

When I first came to the House of Commons and walked out into the lobby, men sprang to their feet.

They even came to raise the methods of slaughter to the rank of “science”… We would not (On ne saurait”, Fr.) imagine a more extraordinary moral blindness!

The BBC came to me and they wanted to adapt the book [Three Musketeers] again, in the straightforward way, and I said no to that.

You will go away with old, good friends. And don’t forget when you leave why you came.

To the lands I knew before you came, And the cool ocean breezes shall blow from me The memory of your name.

When the opportunity to choreograph came up, it was nothing more in my head but an opportunity. Then it suddenly became a career very quickly.

One returns to the place one came from.

My parents’ convictions, when it came to discipline, were not very strong.