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" I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself. "

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

" Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted. "

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

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

" Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. "

" In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry. "

Northern Ireland

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy. "

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

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

" 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 more a threshold than a path. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" My passport's green. "

" 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. "

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

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