Bloody Christmas, here again, let us raise a loving cup, peace on earth, goodwill to men, and make them do the washing up.

I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.

Bloody men are like bloody buses - you wait for about a year and as soon as one approaches your stop two or three others appear.

I have a theory that if you've got the kind of parents who want to send you to boarding school, you're probably better off at boarding school.

I like a quiet life.

I like buying clothes, especially as I get a tax-deductible allowance.

I've never been more famous than I was, suddenly, in 1986.

I've said what I'm prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you're going to tell them a whole lot more.

Possibly I've become less funny as I've been happier.

I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.

I was single for a long time and felt very much alone in the world, and talk of family values upset me very much at that phase in my life, because I used to think: 'What about people like me?'

In my case, the long gaps between my books have got quite a lot to do with lack of confidence. A lot of the time when I'm not writing I start thinking I can't do it.

The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.

There is some humour in 'Family Values.' I don't want everyone to think it's not going to make them laugh. But there are quite a lot of poems there that aren't funny at all.