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" As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does. "

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" I've been in the habit of helping people. "

" I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis. "

" One doesn't want one's identity coerced. "

" I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on. "

" My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written. "

" In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. "

" I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. "

" It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress. "

" Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. "

" My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland. "

" Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. "

" I spend almost every morning with mail. "

" The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group. "

" What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar. "

" The end of art is peace. "

" I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university. "

" Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. "

" Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution. "

" You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. "

" If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. "

" Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker. "

" The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. "

" The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. "

" Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. "

" I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression. "

" There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. "

" I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence. "

" The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. "

" To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. "

" It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme. "