Quotes from Tony Harrison

I've realised darkness and light are inter-dependent, just as death is an enhancer of life.

Honours seem to be the nature of British life. It's horrible. Maybe I'm mad, but the older I get, the less I want to have honours loaded on me.

I really admire the great Japanese artists who could change their name three times in a lifetime. You could get rid of one and renew yourself.

One of the important things about familiar form and metricality is that it draws attention to the physical nature of language: the spell-binding nature of it and the ceremony of articulation.

The ones we choose to love become our anchorwhen the hawser of the blood-tie's hacked, or frays.

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in 'The Gaze of the Gorgon.'

For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.

Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper?

Not becoming 'something' scares me the most. I just want to be remembered for something great.

There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.

You get early inoculation against the idea of success if you're a poet. When I published my first collection of sonnets, I sold about five copies; now kids study them for A level. Wanting to be successful in that other world of money or fame is not interesting. Poetry isn't like that, and it never has been.

It's been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century.

I spent a lot of time on recce. It is a kind of creative chaos, but I like the sense of creative serendipity.

I'm hoping to have a ninth decade like Matisse's.

Looking back, fire images have been constant in my poetry. As a boy, it was my job to light the fire each morning, and I remember the celebratory bonfires at the end of the war. It was from staring into fire that I began my first poetry.

'Night Mail' belongs quintessentially to the age of steam. It is impossible to simply go with the idea of remaking it.

Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.

Weeping for the dead's a waste of breath - they're lucky, they can't die again.

Sweet pulp and sour skin - Or was it sweet outside, and sour within?

Our heads will happen cold when this is found.

ah've been on t'dole all mi life in fucking Leeds!

Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose! All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see 's been dubbed by [Us] into RP, Received Pronunciation, please believe [Us] your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.

Smokers of the world unite! On t'count o' three, all light up, right? 1-2-3... You've all been cowed. I've changed the law and it's allowed. Try again then. 1-2-3: all light your fags now after me.