67 Quotes by Andrew Motion

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.

... each of us describes our existence by means of objects which are indifferent to us, which survive us, and which are then thrown back into the common stock from which they are soon gathered again and ascribed other roles in other circumstances.

[American Psycho] is ”throughout numbingly boring, and for much of the time deeply and extremely disgusting. Not interesting-disgusting, but disgusting-disgusting: sickening, cheaply sensationalist, pointless except as a way of earning its author some money and notoriety.

I am a vigilant monarchist. I want to see things evolve. The direction the monarchy seems to be moving in - towards a more mainland-European model - is one I would feel sympathetic about.

I'm an early bird, partly because I like to have some quiet time and partly because by 9am emails begin arriving, the phone starts ringing and I have dragons to kill of one sort or another.

Pretty much every weekend, my wife and I have the shall-we-live-in-the-country conversation. I suppose it's something to do with getting older and feeling I want to shed some of the things I've been doing for the last 20 years and go back to my roots.

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.

Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.