Tony Harrison

I am capable of bad taste - deliberately.

It is always better to write for the whole of society than for the poetry-reading public.

I spent a lot of time on recce. It is a kind of creative chaos, but I like the sense of creative serendipity.

'Night Mail' belongs quintessentially to the age of steam. It is impossible to simply go with the idea of remaking it.

Coming from a very inarticulate family made me try to speak for those who can't express themselves and created a need for articulation at its most ceremonial - poetry.

I love being on the road with others, with a camera, but also being alone writing poetry.

I've realised darkness and light are inter-dependent, just as death is an enhancer of life.

I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to.

Theatre has to be theatrical. It has to draw attention to itself, like poetry.

I hate the anglicanisation of culture, the idea that culture is genteel. It's not genteel.

I hate everything about writing except doing it.

The ear will surrender even at those times when the eye wants to close, when the eye doesn't want to watch.

I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. 'Poet' covers it all for me.

You can make poems out of anger as well as tenderness. You can make poetry out of anything. It can be the ugliest of emotions. It doesn't have to be sweetness and light.

I have always loved radio as a medium.

Of course you have to provide for the vulnerable and the children, but also, the vulnerable and the children need art in some form or another. You need spiritual experiences that, I think, forms of art give best.

I'm not the sort of person who reads much about himself.

I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section.

Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper?

Yes, I've got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honour that as well.

The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets.

The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close.

I often find myself quoting from Victor Hugo after one of my theatrical ventures. 'Now that my play is a failure,' he once said, 'I find I love it all the more.' I first quoted that after 'Square Rounds' at the Olivier in 1992.

Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in 'The Gaze of the Gorgon.'

You get early inoculation against the idea of success if you're a poet. When I published my first collection of sonnets, I sold about five copies; now kids study them for A level. Wanting to be successful in that other world of money or fame is not interesting. Poetry isn't like that, and it never has been.