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

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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. "

" 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 passport's green. "

" Write whatever you like! "

" Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "

" 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. "

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

" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "

" 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. "

" The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it. "

" I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. "

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