Carol Ann Duffy Quotes

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.

I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.

The best books arise from some ultimate question in the author.

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

But, yeah, I'm really happy when I'm writing. When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know, if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought, you have a receptacle to go home and say, 'Oh, this would be great in this script.' Your antenna's out in a different way, and I love that time.

Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

By the time I was 12, I had memorised hundreds of couplets. I could recite for hours poems written by others. I knew I could write a line in metre. But I never dared to do it till I was 33 years old.

That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.