The beginnings of a forest is one of the ugliest things on the planet. It's bleak and your neighbours hate you.

When I was young, I wanted to be the greatest blues singer of all time. I wrecked my education and left home for it.

I loathe and detest movies and television and don't watch any. I do not have the time.

For me, temptation is life and I have a gargantuan appetite for everything.

People think I'm just an old Luddite, but that's untrue. I buy every new gizmo as it comes out, play with it until I understand how it works, and then give it away.

The reason I don't carry a mobile phone is I don't want people to know where I am!

I'm an entrepreneur, a businessman. I've got a lot of money, and that doesn't go very well with the whole 'starving artist in a garret' routine.

People who get trapped in the tunnel vision of making money think that is all there is to life.

I write about whatever turns up. Every single day, I'm sitting down for three to five hours in the evenings wrestling away and producing far too much verse.

No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.

I have an over-attachment to precision, which is why I've sold more magazines than any man alive.

You cannot be seeking yourself when you're making money.

I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

I have been portrayed by actors in three television documentaries, two plays, one musical and a film. It's no fun watching yourself being traduced and imitated by an actor.

It's a long, slow sunset for ink-on-paper magazines, but sunsets can produce vast sums of money.

Human beings are definitely changing the planet, but how much impact they are having on climate, I don't know and I don't care.

Native trees are so important to our ecosystem.

You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.

'The Week' is my favourite magazine. Everyone from presidents to CEOs of companies love it, politicians, people in the massive charity business in America, in the arts and even more especially in the media.

Publishing magazines for yourself is not good business, man.

I'm very proud of the fact that I'm one of Britain's biggest selling poets. That gives me a huge amount of pleasure.

With the greatest of respect, I have watched Apple from the day it started. I was publishing magazines about the Apple II before most people had ever heard what a personal computer was.

I couldn't care less what anyone's 'perception' of me is. I'm too long in the tooth to care.