“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

I’ve been in the habit of helping people.

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

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.

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

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

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.

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.

Write whatever you like!

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.

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

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.

I just think they aren’t true. I’m saying that our generation wants stuff that is substantial and challenging, as well as thoughtful and endearing. Well, I don’t know if I’m doing that, but I’m trying.

It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.

We couldn’t sustain it. And they got a lot of kids that can shoot. We just couldn’t close out well enough.

I think it’s more about trying to just focus exclusively on writing music and making that a viable, sustainable lifestyle.

The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.

Developing protectionism regarding trade and our reluctance to place fiscal policy on a more sustainable path are threatening what may well be our most valued policy asset.

We have continued to position ourselves in a way that will catch this very sustainable and fundamentally supported wave of volume growth and at the same time, help our customer base achieve their lofty goals of growth as well.

Nowadays, food needs to be healthy, local, sustainable and not filled with too much fat, salt or sugar.