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

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" I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

" 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. "

" Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" My passport's green. "

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

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

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

" I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "

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

" Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic. "

" We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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