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

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

" 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 spend almost every morning with mail. "

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

" The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky. "

" History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The end of art is peace. "

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

" 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. "

" The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it. "

" The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write. "

" 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. "

" The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. "

" The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Write whatever you like! "

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

" One doesn't want one's identity coerced. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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