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

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" 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. "

" What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar. "

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

" My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained. "

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

" The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders. "

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

" 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. "

" Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep. "

" The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also. "

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

" If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries. "

" 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. "

" My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress. "

" 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. "

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

" In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. "