Possibly I've become less funny as I've been happier.
— Wendy Cope
I like a quiet life.
I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.
I've said what I'm prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you're going to tell them a whole lot more.
Bloody men are like bloody buses - you wait for about a year and as soon as one approaches your stop two or three others appear.
There is some humour in 'Family Values.' I don't want everyone to think it's not going to make them laugh. But there are quite a lot of poems there that aren't funny at all.
In my case, the long gaps between my books have got quite a lot to do with lack of confidence. A lot of the time when I'm not writing I start thinking I can't do it.
I was single for a long time and felt very much alone in the world, and talk of family values upset me very much at that phase in my life, because I used to think: 'What about people like me?'
I've never been more famous than I was, suddenly, in 1986.
Bloody Christmas, here again, let us raise a loving cup, peace on earth, goodwill to men, and make them do the washing up.
I like buying clothes, especially as I get a tax-deductible allowance.
I have a theory that if you've got the kind of parents who want to send you to boarding school, you're probably better off at boarding school.
The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.
I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.
