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" Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. "

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

" I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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 day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it. "

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

" 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. "

" At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "

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

" 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. "

" One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges. "

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

" 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. "

" Sonnet is about movement in a form. "

" 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. "

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

" I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression. "

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

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

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

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

" Write whatever you like! "

" 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. "