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

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.

The infamous they.

The cool thing about being famous is traveling. I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.

I’m not in it for fame. I’ve been famous in the streets already.

To me, music is art and fashion is art, but fame? Fame isn’t art, but the person you become when you’re famous – your alter ego – that’s art.

I’m gonna be famous forever.

For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial.

People just assume that if you’re famous, you’re in Hollywood.

I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean.