I found enormous opposition to my religion. It's like if you want to strengthen your biceps you lift heavy weight as heavy as you can handle and work your muscles against resistance until it grows strong. I had to do that with my religion.

Religion is not a burden not a weight it is wings.

Another mode of accumulating power arises from lifting a weight and then allowing it to fall.

I have two daughters and I have done everything in my power to prevent them from assimilating even being aware of my idiocy about my weight.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

I don't like to boast but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether the trick they miss is that being called this thing with the weight of tradition behind it and with the association of the Royal family does allow you to have conversations and to open doors and wallets for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

In the language of poetry where every word is weighed nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all not a single existence not anyone's existence in this world.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry on the other hand poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.