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" 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. "

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" To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. "

" The end of art is peace. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

Northern Ireland

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them. "

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

" I spend almost every morning with mail. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. "

" I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. "

" 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 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. "