Simon Armitage Quotes

The kind of music that God must hearing, no matter how busy or distracted, because it comes out of hundreds of square Miles of nothingness, out of the emptiness of the hills and the silence of the moors ...

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

I once swallowed my difference without water on an empty stomach.

This misfortune you find is of your own manufacture.
Keep hold of what you have, it will harm no other,
for hatred comes home to the hand that chose it.

They said we probably wouldn't be let back into Canada, suggesting we'd just have to live forever on the bridge, cadging fruit and peanuts from passing motorists and drinking the spray thrown up by the mighty falls, but the guard at the north end just smiled and waved us through.

A woman plays the Northumberland pipes; from where I'm sitting, on a wall at the back, it looks like she's giving physiotherapy to a small marsupial wearing callipers and smoking a bong, but the sound is haunting and hypnotic, mournful and melodic at the same time, every note somehow harmonising with the low, droning purr.

Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.
Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.

You get up one day and somebody has taken one of the mountains away

Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge.

It's never going to be very mainstream. One reason is that poetry requires concentration, both on the part of the writer and the reader. But it's kind of unkillable, poetry. It's our most ancient artform and I think it's more relevant today than ever, because it's one person saying what they really believe.

My God . . . that grinding is a greeting.
My arrival is honored with the honing of an axe

If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.

It reminds me to say that staying local should never be about looking at the world through a closed window, but about making a home then throwing the doors open and inviting the world in.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

Where does the hand become the wrist?
where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed
and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that
razor's edge
between something and nothing, between
one and the other.

The ordinary can be absolutely miraculous.

I once stood in the middle of New York city watching my name go round the electronic zipper sign in Times Square and I felt pretty thrilled, but not quite as thrilled as I felt when I saw my name in the 'Examiner' for the first time.