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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" Sonnet is about movement in a form. "

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

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

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

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

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

" 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. "

" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine. "

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

" Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker. "

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

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

" I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. "

" 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. "

" The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it. "