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

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

" I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. "

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

" If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries. "

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

" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "

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

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

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

" My passport's green. "

" 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 poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "

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

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

" As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does. "

" 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. "

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

" As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "