Top 40 Carol Ann Duffy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we will become.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

2. “You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

3. “I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

4. “What will you do now with the gift of your left life?”

— Carol Ann Duffy

5. “The stars are filming us for no one.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

6. “Poetry and prayer are very similar.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

7. “It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

8. “Like the sand and the oyster, it’s a creative irritant. In each poem, I’m trying to reveal a truth, so it can’t have a fictional beginning.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

9. “Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

10. “I always say that I’ll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

11. “I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

12. “Better off dead than giving in; not taking what you want.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

13. “How would you prepare to die on a perfect April evening?”

— Carol Ann Duffy

14. “My prose is turgid, it just hasn’t got any energy.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

15. “As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

16. “Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments – its power is not in narrative. I’m not dealing with facts, I’m dealing with emotion.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

17. “She stood upon a continent of ice, which sparkled between sea and sky, endless and dazzling, as though the world kept all its treasure there; a scale which balanced poetry and prayer.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

18. “Poets sing our human music for us.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

19. “Between 9am and 3pm is when I work most intensely.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

20. “I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

21. “You have me like a drawing, erased, coloured in, untitled, signed by your tongue.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

22. “Every day is a gift with a child, no matter what problems you have.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

23. “The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience – anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

24. “Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

25. “If we think of what’s up ahead, with climate change and wars over water, it’s very frightening.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

26. “I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

27. “Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

28. “I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

29. “Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

30. “I’ll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

31. “I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

32. “If poetry could truly tell it backwards, then it would.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

33. “I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It’s like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

34. “Having a child takes you back to all those parts of your own childhood that you had hidden away.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

35. “If I felt, in the event of a royal wedding, inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I would just be grateful to have an idea for the poem. And if I didn’t, I’d ignore it.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

36. “I always wanted a child. Being a mother is the central thing in my life.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

37. “Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas, and there’s no way I’d do anything to undermine that belief.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

38. “I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

39. “The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near the wise, drowned silence of the dead.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

40. “It’s always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

41. “C’est la vie. When I got ill, it hurt like hell. I bought a kidney with my credit card, then I got well. I keep Faust’s secret still –the clever, cunning, callous bastard didn’t have a soul to sell.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

42. “When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else’s. It’s like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn’t know was there, full of treasure and light.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

43. “I like to think that I’m a sort of poet for our times.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

44. “I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

45. “I think of him in certain lights, dawn, late afternoon,...”

— Carol Ann Duffy