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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. "

" Write whatever you like! "

" In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. "

" Sonnet is about movement in a form. "

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

" The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them. "

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

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

" 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. "