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" I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary. "

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know. "

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I spend almost every morning with mail. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance. "

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

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

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

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

" The end of art is peace. "

" 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. "

" Write whatever you like! "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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