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

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" 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. "

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

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

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

" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. "

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

" History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I spend almost every morning with mail. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

Northern Ireland

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

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

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

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