Quotes from Carol Ann Duffy

Having a child takes you back to all those parts of your own childhood that you had hidden away.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.

I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety.

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale which balanced poetry and prayer.

What do I haveto help me, without spell or prayer,endure this hour, endless, heartless, anonymous,the death of love?

If I felt, in the event of a royal wedding, inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I would just be grateful to have an idea for the poem. And if I didn't, I'd ignore it.

I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

Every day is a gift with a child, no matter what problems you have.

Poets sing our human music for us.

When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.

My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy.

I always wanted a child. Being a mother is the central thing in my life.