“I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.”

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.

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

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.

It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.

The end of art is peace.

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 suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.

In the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion.

They all err – Muslims, Christians, Jews and Magians.

whether Shiite or Sunnis from north, south, west or east, they can get together and exchange their views.

We cannot look at the Latino community and preach ‘one language.’ No one gave them an English test before they sent them to Iraq to fight for America.

Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

We just have to hope and pray that this man [Donald Trump] is changed in terms of how he views the world community.

So we want to make sure that happens is that we build a relationship with the police department and the community that results in better policing and better cooperation with the community.

One of the things that`s offensive is saying in the fifth district there`s nothing going on. This is a very vast district.