Andrew Motion Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

“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.”

“Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.”

“When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.”

“When you're being looked at very hard, it's very hard to look back. And that made me stop paying attention to the world in a way that allowed me then to write about it.”