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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. "

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

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

" A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. "

" You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "