“Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.”

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

I spend almost every morning with mail.

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

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’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

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

I’m an optimistic guy. I’m one of those big dreamers. I’m one of those kids with that annoying imagination.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

I have an optimistic view of everything. You have to, otherwise you’d go nuts.

When God is involved, anything can happen. Be open. Stay that way. God has a beautiful way of bringing good vibrations out of broken chords.

Regardless of the challenges and obstacles that have been put in front of me, I am staying optimistic about the remainder of the year.

People who have drawn wealth into their lives used The Secret, whether consciously or unconsciously. They think thoughts of abundance and wealth, and they do allow any contradictory thoughts to take root in their minds.

All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.

No star. glow brighter than an optimistic soul like yours.