“The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.”

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.

Buddhists say that a fixed smile, however false, lights up the soul.

The so-called culture nowadays is only a fake one with a superficial front. It is an empty lie.

Be yourself. Don’t pretend that you know something you don’t.

I think that you can’t fake doing the job. All I want to do is deliver. That’s my focus.

Don’t create the appearance of fake authority.

You have to be more fake.’ You see some of these actors, they have a permanent smile on their face. How can they do that? It really fascinates me.

Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying time heals all wounds is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

People need realness, reality. People can sense when someone is being pretentious or fake. It’s because you feel it; you see it in someone’s body language.