“What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.”

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

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.

The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.

You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.

I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

If I were to ask the famous Henry Ford to come over here and do what I tell him to do, would he do it? Never! But if I were to make a thousand-year-old corpse come alive before his eyes, he would jump at the chance to stay here and wash my clothes!

That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

My favorite thing about being famous… it’s not really as big of a deal as everybody says it is. Being on the road is tough, doing interviews, and all the stuff. It’s still pretty tough.

Obviously there was Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe, but Howard was on the brink of becoming a famous director – it didn’t happen because he died.

Working in the context of ultra-famous brands like Dior and Vuitton, creative spirits are always going to feel reined in. It’s important that they are free to develop ideas. And rather than detracting from the principal job, it reinforces it. I think of that money as venture capital. It’s not a big investment.

I don’t need to be famous. I’m not that ambitious. At this point, if I’m not sucked in, I’m never going to get sucked in. Being the so-called hot girl, I disconnect from that. It’s not that deep.