Simon Armitage Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Simon Armitage

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. — Simon Armitage

The Huddersfield that I like best is a large town with a big heart and an open mind. — Simon Armitage

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. — Simon Armitage

As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry. — Simon Armitage

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

God help us both if this is summer.
The sun shines all day and all night
but it has no warmth, no light, no colour. — Simon Armitage

I wondered if people might not have had enough of Simon Armitage and wondered whether I hadn't had enough of Simon Armitage. — Simon Armitage

We don't know where print is going. — Simon Armitage

The ordinary can be absolutely miraculous. — Simon Armitage

We still need a voice that thinks before it speaks. — Simon Armitage

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books. — Simon Armitage

And wonder, dread and war have lingered in that land where loss and love in turn have held the upper hand. — Simon Armitage

In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself. — Simon Armitage

We also pass a farmer in his yard, power-washing a donkey with a high-pressure hose. — Simon Armitage

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

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 ... — Simon Armitage

Occasionally it's been a long and bumpy road - one I'm still travelling - but I've always felt like my home town has been solidly behind me and I'm both grateful and proud. — Simon Armitage

Somebody will be able to crack ebook files in the same way that people cracked music files a decade ago. An author could have worked for three years on his book, have someone buy it for their Kindle for £6.99 and then see it shared with everyone in the world for free. — Simon Armitage

I'd got to a point where I wanted a break. — Simon Armitage

I even feel guilty if I'm reading a novel, because I think I should be reading Homer again. I don't really know what free time is, because I don't have something to measure it against. — Simon Armitage

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. — Simon Armitage

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. — Simon Armitage

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. — Simon Armitage

Killing time in the precinct, I find a copy of one of my early volumes in a dump-bin on the pavement outside the charity shop. The price is 10p. It is a signed copy. Under the signature, in my own handwriting, are the words, "To mum and dad". — Simon Armitage

You're beautiful because when you were born, undiscovered planets lined up to peep over the rim of your cradle and lay gifts of gravity and light at your miniature feet — Simon Armitage

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. — Simon Armitage

Brace and be brisk,
commoner, carry your heart like an egg
on a spoon, be fleet through the concourse, primed
for that point in time when the world goes bust — Simon Armitage

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. — Simon Armitage

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. — Simon Armitage

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. — Simon Armitage

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

I'm on page 12 of 80 of Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus: Waves were never the tide but ripples, spawned by moon-coloured ships of war. — Simon Armitage

The melancholy comes over me, the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud. — Simon Armitage