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" As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. "

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" I'm a firm believer in learning by heart. "

" When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation. "

" 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. "

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

" The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. "

" In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart. "

" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "

" One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges. "

" The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky. "

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

" My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally. "

" The end of art is peace. "

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

" Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. "

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

" The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. "

" My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God. "

" The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders. "

" I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. "

" There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know. "

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

" Write whatever you like! "

" I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. "

" 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. "

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