In a general way, I want to be a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry. – 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 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
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. – T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919