Andrew Motion famous quotes

04-22-2025

I'm ensuring my place in heaven.
-- Andrew Motion

#Heaven
Jenni Fagan is the real thing, and The Panopticon is a real treat: maturely alive to the pains of maturing, and cleverly amused as well as appalled by what it finds in the world.
-- Andrew Motion

#Pain #Real #Alive
Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary.
-- Andrew Motion

#Honor #Ordinary
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

#Writing #Trying #Moments
I read ' Treasure Island' for the first time at university. And I started to notice then how unresolved some things were. Later, I realised that Stevenson was interested in sequels, and I wondered whether he would have gone back to it had he lived longer.
-- Andrew Motion

#Islands #Treasure #Firsts
I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don't make enough money.
-- Andrew Motion

#Beautiful #Buying #Painting
I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am.
-- Andrew Motion

#Writing #Two #Tea
I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time.
-- Andrew Motion

#People #Feelings #Sentimental
I deeply adored my mum. She was an extraordinary person, even for the prejudice I'm likely to have. She was beautiful, amusing, a tremendous elaborator of things into comic proportions and extravagant in her imagination.
-- Andrew Motion

#Beautiful #Imagination #Prejudice
I am writing more than I have ever done. My life has come back to me in the most extraordinary way.
-- Andrew Motion

#Writing #Way #Done
I am a vigilant monarchist. I want to see things evolve. The direction the monarchy seems to be moving in - towards a more mainland-European model - is one I would feel sympathetic about.
-- Andrew Motion

#Moving #Want #Sympathetic
Each sudden gust of light explains itself as flames, but neither they, nor even bombs redoubled on the hills tonight can quite include me in their fear.
-- Andrew Motion

#Flames #Light #Tonight
But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
-- Andrew Motion

#Wordsworth #Poet #Admire
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

#Writing #Way #Modern
But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.
-- Andrew Motion

#Writing #Hats #Bells
Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril
-- Andrew Motion

#Heart #Emotional #Forget
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

#Powerful #Interesting #Needs

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