In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

We talked about politics constantly in my family growing up in North Carolina. There were always debates. Being of Greek background it's in our blood to drink coffee and talk politics.

As a society I think we express our cultural mores through our politics. We're trying constantly to figure out what's OK and what's not OK. And it's hard because our society is constantly buffeted by gale force winds of technology. Things are always changing.

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.

One thing I have frankly decided is that when it comes to political reform we have two conservative parties in British politics. Both the Labour and Conservative parties have constantly and repeatedly failed to honour promises they have made about reforming cleaning modernising our clapped-out system.

When times are tough constant conflict may be good politics but in the real world cooperation works better. After all nobody's right all the time and a broken clock is right twice a day.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect not a pleasurable memory of itself but an immediate constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

By the general process of epic poetry I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.