I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and I'm just an arrogant little thing. It's hard for me to admit that I can't understand something, let alone not be in charge of it.

I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked.

Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

We expect that in the next years, the economy will improve. And we expect that extreme poverty will drop from 22 percent to 11 percent by the year 2000.

The things being smuggled in under the cover of Brexit will damage so much of what we hold dear. A cabal of tycoons would see their wealth and influence turbocharged, while the mass of the population would see their prosperity, their security and, ultimately, their liberty dwindle away.

Our children lost our direction because they have been compromised. They have found freedom at the ballot box, and then they have taken on plastic chains around their minds and souls and mortgage their future on credit cards. They have to learn better - they have to learn the value of ideas and health as opposed to wealth.

I don't want to sound like Catherine Cookson but I've worked since I was eight, with a paper round and in a fruit and veg shop. Taking a pay cut won't demotivate me, not at all. It's not about money in the first place. It's about the job.