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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. "

" Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. "

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

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

" Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. "

" My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God. "

" 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. "

" Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. "

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

" A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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