Quotes from John Cooper Clarke

I would describe my style of dress as careful.

Happiness is the target one only has to aim at in order to miss.

I don't go looking for new fads.

There've been lots of positive changes in the city since I worked at Salford Tech in the seventies, and I'm pleased to be known as Salford's Bard and to have helped put it on the map.

It was a tedious saying among hippies: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. I was very much part of the problem.

I had TB as a boy. They said my skeletal frame never developed properly.

If you want to know why the coast is such an inspirational place, ask Herman Melville, Jack London, Nordhoff and Hall, Robert Louis Stevenson or Joseph Conrad. It's a glimpse of eternity. It invites rumination, the relentless whisper of the tide against the shore.

When the punk rock thing happened, I thought, 'Right, I have one chance here to be seen as part of some wider social phenomenon.'

Lyrics became important for a while in the late Seventies. Patti Smith was a poet and a rock star, as much one as the other, the distinctions were a bit blurred and then you get swept up in it. Punk poet, it's a good enough term.

Dutch food is terrible, I think. What sort of person starts the day with egg and cheese?

At the beginning, there was no chance I'd get published so I thought I'd give it a go live. I had to perform in rock band places and working men's clubs, where you wouldn't expect to find poetry. I ploughed a lonely furrow.

By the '80s, anything to do with punk was perceived as rancid. Me being known as the 'punk poet' meant my work and I plummeted.

I've been kept from honest employment for a long, long time now. Thank God!

The one thing I got right was that I already looked like a punk when punk arrived.

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

If there's a gene, I got it from my ma. Her writing has this effortless quality.

If you don't like The Ramones, you don't like rock 'n'roll. They're like The Beach Boys without the sea.

Poets are supposed to be underappreciated, don't you know? There is always a strange reaction to those who become successful in their own lifetime, and so I always felt lucky that I made the living I did out of it.

I hate chickpeas. I like hummus but I ate that before I realised it was made out of chickpeas.

The greatest threat to any artist is surrounding themselves with people who love everything they do.

There are only three things that stop me sleeping: hunger, the odd bad dream and cramp in the arches of my feet - it's crippling, as if somebody's trying to tie your foot in a reef knot.

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

If I'd have known how much fun fatherhood would be, I would have started way earlier than 45.

Where's the mileage in an autobiography? Anyone who writes one inevitably casts themselves as a hero, and I'm not about to do that.