“Sonnet is about movement in a form.”

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.

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.

I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed.

Did you know, in the entire universe, we are the only intelligent life forms thought to have a Miss Universe contest?

If A denotes one of the two constant traits, for example, the dominating one, a the recessive, and the Aa the hybrid form in which both are united, then the expression: gives the series for the progeny of plants hybrid in a pair of differing traits.

Some kinds of nails, such as those used for defending the soles of coarse shoes, called hobnails, require a particular form of the head, which is made by the stroke of a die.

Did you know, throughout the cosmos they found intelligent life forms that play to play? We are the only ones that play to win. Explains why we have more than our share of losers.

Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of nature’s varied forms.

Death I believe has many forms. It is a shapeshifter. But amongst all the forms it has, love is my favorite.

Money can’t buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.