There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

By legitimizing Iran's nuclear program, removing the pressure of economic sanctions, and allowing it to obtain conventional weapons and ballistic missiles, this agreement makes the prospect for war more likely, not less.

We have a responsibility as ex-soldiers to realise we're no longer in the military. All this 'once a soldier, always a soldier', that's all well and good, but that attitude doesn't work in society.

Would you ask Picasso to explain 'Guernica?' Would you ask Nabokov to explain 'Lolita?' Would you ask Tolstoy about 'War and Peace?' No, you wouldn't dare.

I want to help with Muslim integration. If you follow the line of Marine Le Pen, you create a civil war.