“I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.”

I spend almost every morning with mail.

Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

If someone is hostile in the delivery of their feedback, remember that it is an expression of their level of fear, not your level of incompetence or unlovability.

If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.

Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice.

The journey is part of the experience – an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.

Unexpressed feelings reside in music that does not have lyrics, but feelings in rhythm!

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.

Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong: it is a geographical expression.

Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.