Tony Harrison Quotes

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I'm hoping to have a ninth decade like Matisse's.

You litter poems with too much learning when you're younger.

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

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've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet.

I've written on public matters, but I don't understand how anyone could tout me as a possible poet laureate when I wrote a poem on the abdication of King Charles III or about the sex life of the Royals... anybody who knew my work would know I'm not a contender.

I think that, as you get older, you want to be freer rather than more bound.

I think it's the tendency to want to create gods and monotheistic absolutes and absolute certainties that is the continual temptation in human thought - that's the great danger. Every time we create a god, we diminish humanity.

One of the important things about familiar form and metricality is that it draws attention to the physical nature of language: the spell-binding nature of it and the ceremony of articulation.

I believe more in the power of drama than in the power of religion.

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

I need to look back on my poetic ventures, make sense of them as a whole, and move forward... and to experiment without external demands.

Honours seem to be the nature of British life. It's horrible. Maybe I'm mad, but the older I get, the less I want to have honours loaded on me.

I really admire the great Japanese artists who could change their name three times in a lifetime. You could get rid of one and renew yourself.

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.

I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation.

Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.

It's been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century.

Looking back, fire images have been constant in my poetry. As a boy, it was my job to light the fire each morning, and I remember the celebratory bonfires at the end of the war. It was from staring into fire that I began my first poetry.

There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.

The imagination has its limits, and you have to face up to that.

I'd rather climb Everest than go for a walk in the park.

I was brought up on music hall, and at the same time, I was studying Greek at the age of 12.

I like a direct relationship between actor and audience.

For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.

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