I deeply adored my mum. She was an extraordinary person, even for the prejudice Im likely to have. She was beautiful, amusing, a tremendous elaborator of things into comic proportions and extravagant in her imagination. – Andrew Motion
Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, theres been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived… Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos. – Andrew Motion
I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I dont make enough money. – Andrew Motion
I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry. – Andrew Motion