“One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.”

It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.

Write whatever you like!

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.

I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

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.

When I’m driving the highway by myself is when I write best.

If I had a Paul Scholes in my team, everything would be around him. At Manchester United, they saw it like that, but I think Paul Scholes is one of the best I’ve played against in this league, and seen anywhere.

I can’t do anything with what’s happened in the past. I have to just go forward with the most awareness I can going forward and trying to be the best I can be for our team.

Certainly I accept my role and responsibility as a public figure and a lot of it you take the good with the bad, dealing with different adversities in life, you just try to do the best you can do.

Women simply need to know the right technique of shaving to get the best results.

Not doing it is certainly the best way to not getting it.

Positive Thinking is not about expecting the best to ‎happen. It’s about accepting that whatever happens, happens for the best.

That’s the hardest part of this whole process. The best part is picking the players and the worst part is telling basically five players they are not going to play tonight.