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" I believe we are put here to improve civilisation. "

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

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

" Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel. "

" Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world. "

" 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. "

" Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye. "

" I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary. "

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

" 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. "

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

" The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it. "

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

" 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. "

" Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. "

" Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. "

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

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

" I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it. "

" But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based. "

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

" In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. "

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

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

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

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

" I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. "