Quotes from Simon Armitage

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

We don't know where print is going.

Somebody will be able to crack ebook files in the same way that people cracked music files a decade ago. An author could have worked for three years on his book, have someone buy it for their Kindle for £6.99 and then see it shared with everyone in the world for free.

It reminds me to say that staying local should never be about looking at the world through a closed window, but about making a home then throwing the doors open and inviting the world in.

We still need a voice that thinks before it speaks.

I wondered if people might not have had enough of Simon Armitage and wondered whether I hadn't had enough of Simon Armitage.

The Huddersfield that I like best is a large town with a big heart and an open mind.

Anyway, it's liberating when you get to a point in a poem where you can legitimately deviate from the form, and I like the tension that can exist between expectation and execution. Like there's something a little more idiosyncratic or individual going on.

Poets, I dare you to choose, for one night, the ambrosia over the ashes.

The ordinary can be absolutely miraculous.

People can't put on an opera, but they can write a poem. It's accessible art.

I'm still young enough to think that death is something that happens to other people.

Lifetimes went past. With the critical mass of hardly more than the thought of a thought I kept on, headlong, to vanishing point. I looked for an end, for some dimension to hold hard and resist. But I still exist.

Boy with the name and face I don't remember, you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

In a life, most of us turn no more than 45 degrees. Not much compared to those who turn full-circle in the slighest breeze or those who totally uncoil, but enough in the end to tell a bag of diamonds from a sack of coal.

Think, two things on their own and both at once.

Right here you made an angel of yourself, free-falling backwards into last night's snow, indenting a straight, neat, crucified shape, then flapping your arms, one stroke, a great bird, to leave the impression of wings. It worked.

That heart had been an apple once, they reckoned. Green. They had a scheme to plant an apple there again beginning with a pip, but he rejected it.

Mother, any distance greater than a single span requires a second pair of hands.

Ignite the flares, connect the phones, wind all the clocks; the sun goes rusty like a medal in its box - collect it from the loft. Peg out the stars, replace the bulbs of Jupiter and Mars. A man like that takes something with him when he dies, but he has wept the coins that rested on his eyes, eased out the stopper from the mouthpiece of the cave, exhumed his own white body from the grave.