Quotes by Andrew Motion

About Andrew Motion:

Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

In a general way, I want to be a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry.

Andrew Motion

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.

Andrew Motion

While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyon...

Andrew Motion

I've found a different way to scent the air: already it's a by-word for despair.

Andrew Motion

You see the names of places roundabout? They're mine now, and I've turned them inside out.

Andrew Motion

I've always thought that the balance between the side of my mind that knows what it is doing and the side that really hasn't got a clue has to be carefully maintained because if you write too knowingly then you get chilly, and if you write too unknow...

Andrew Motion

Well, it's a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and d...

Andrew Motion

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

Andrew Motion

But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.

Andrew Motion

In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.

Andrew Motion

I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am.

Andrew Motion

But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

Andrew Motion

I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.

Andrew Motion

I think it is interesting to think about the absolute animal relish young people have for rhythm and rhyme.

Andrew Motion

If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

Andrew Motion

Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.

Andrew Motion

I'm ensuring my place in heaven.

Andrew Motion

I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.

Andrew Motion

Pretty much every weekend, my wife and I have the shall-we-live-in-the-country conversation. I suppose it's something to do with getting older and feeling I want to shed some of the things I've been doing for the last 20 years and go back to my roots...

Andrew Motion

These places, and the ancient things you know, You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'

Andrew Motion

Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.

Andrew Motion

Author Bio

  • NameAndrew Motion
  • Descriptionpoet, novelist and biographer from England
  • BornOctober 26, 1952
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPoet; Author; Novelist
  • AwardsCholmondeley Award; Eric Gregory Award