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

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

" Write whatever you like! "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "

" 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 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. "

" 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 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. "

" We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. "

" Sonnet is about movement in a form. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

" 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'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

Northern Ireland

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

" Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world. "