Quotes from Carol Ann Duffy

Edinburgh is my favourite city. We'll be doing a lot of children's theatre and galleries.

The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.

For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we will become.

I still have a feeling that I haven't written the best that I can write. I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.

Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.

Time hates love, wants love poor,/but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw.

Better off dead than giving in; not taking what you want.

I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.

What will you do now with the gift of your left life?

I'm not the first or the last to stand on a hillock, watching the man she married prove to the world he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock. - Mrs Icarus

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you. The room is turning slowly away from the moon. This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear. La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross to reach you. For I am in love with you and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

The stars are filming us for no one.

You have me like a drawing, erased, coloured in, untitled, signed by your tongue.

But life, they said, means life. Dying inside. The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wife which made me worse. I howled in my cell. If the Devil is gone then how could this be hell?

Better off dead than giving in; not taking what you want.

Went to the Zoo, I said to Him- Something about that chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.

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.

Love's language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.

For this, let gardens grow, where beelines end, sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia; where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise in pear trees, plum trees; bees are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.

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

bees are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.

Then he started his period. One week in bed. Two doctors in. Three painkillers four times a day. And later a letter to the powers-that-be demanding full-paid menstrual leave twelve weeks per year. I see him now, his selfish pale face peering at the moon through the bathroom window. The curse , he said, the curse . - Mrs Tiresias