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" I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. "

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

" I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. "

" My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children. "

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

" 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. "

" Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.' "

" 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. "

" Sonnet is about movement in a form. "

" 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. "

" Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. "

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

" My passport's green. "

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

" Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost. "

" 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 fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost. "

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

" The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them. "

" Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted. "

" I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. "

" In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty. "

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

" 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. "

" In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance. "

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