Tony Harrison Quotes

you want to write a book for so many reasons ... The main reason ... is because it will make you well-known and beloved and popular and successful and famous and respected. You also write ... to make money, but that motivation is not first on the list.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

I've got something to live for, because I always wanted to be an artist; I always wanted to be famous.

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.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.

Most people I know don't even realize I'm an award-winning author, but I have gotten many opportunities to travel to places I'd never have visited otherwise.

The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.

I just want to write a great lyric and write a great song, and everything else is icing on the cake.

If there's one thing I've written that could survive into posterity, I'd want that to be the poetry.

Every creativity has a motive. Either one does it for money, for fame, or for passion. My energies go out for passion.

Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.

Poet's food is love and fame.

All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love -- and most of all, an audience!

I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.