Carol Ann Duffy Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal

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.

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

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The stars are filming us for no one.

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

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.

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

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.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

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

As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets.

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.

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

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