Pro football gave me a good sense of perspective to enter politics: I'd already been booed cheered cut sold traded and hung in effigy.

I try not to tune in to politics until it's two or three months before the election. Till then it's like watching preseason football.

Politics is like football if you see daylight go through the hole.

Music is my thing. It's my thing it's what I love. It's what I do. It's football to me it's Christmas to me religion to me poetry to me.

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.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground poets in schools football clubs zoos.

Music was important. Football was the easy part.

If you can miss getting up in the morning and running into a wall I miss playing football. I'll never be a frustrated athlete.

In the last year my wife has noticed me struggling to get downstairs on a Sunday morning. I've two young children and football has been so good to me over the years I don't want to spoil it.

I obviously take a lot of pride in what I do on the football field because that has the ability to influence a lot of people. That puts smiles on people's faces. That gives people a pep in their step on Monday morning when they go back to work.