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

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

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

" Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it. "

" In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example. "

" 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. "

" I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you. "

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

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

" I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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 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. "

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

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