Quotes from Tony Harrison

I have always loved radio as a medium.

I'd rather climb Everest than go for a walk in the park.

I love being on the road with others, with a camera, but also being alone writing poetry.

Of course you have to provide for the vulnerable and the children, but also, the vulnerable and the children need art in some form or another. You need spiritual experiences that, I think, forms of art give best.

The ear will surrender even at those times when the eye wants to close, when the eye doesn't want to watch.

I always like to be somebody scary. When I was little, my mom used to make our costumes. She's really creative and would make us great costumes without having to spend a lot.

I have always disliked the idea of an arts ghetto in which poetry is kept on a life-support system.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

You litter poems with too much learning when you're younger.

I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet.

I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation.

I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. 'Poet' covers it all for me.

I've written on public matters, but I don't understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals... anybody who knew my work would know I'm not a contender.

I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to.

You can make poems out of anger as well as tenderness. You can make poetry out of anything. It can be the ugliest of emotions. It doesn't have to be sweetness and light.

I am capable of bad taste - deliberately.

I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section.

I think it's the tendency to want to create gods and monotheistic absolutes and absolute certainties that is the continual temptation in human thought - that's the great danger. Every time we create a god, we diminish humanity.

Yes, I've got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honour that as well.

I think that, as you get older, you want to be freer rather than more bound.

The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets.

Theatre has to be theatrical. It has to draw attention to itself, like poetry.

The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close.

I'm not the sort of person who reads much about himself.