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

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

Northern Ireland

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" Write whatever you like! "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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