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

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.

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.

The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.

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

I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.

One could with equal justification talk about a Judeo-Islamic tradition or a Christian-Islamic tradition. These three religions are interlinked in many signification ways, which marks them off from the rest of the world.

Medicare provided guaranteed equal coverage, something that the private sector could not

All men are born equal, but quite a few eventually get over it.

justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation.

Our status as a land of equal opportunity has made us a rich and powerful nation, but it has also transformed lives. It has given people like me the chance to grow up knowing that no dream was too big and no goal out of reach.

Violence doesn’t equal strength.

SUSTAINABLE PEACE IS POSSIBLE ONLY WITH WOMEN’S FULL PARTICIPATION, their perspectives, their leadership, their daily, equal presence wherever we seek to make and keep the peace.

There is no human bliss equal to twelve hours of work with only six hours in which to do it.