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

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.

I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

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.

I’ve been known to make out with girls from time to time. Couple drinks involved, you know, it’s fun. And who knows, maybe it’ll go further someday.

What is known can’t jerk us around unwittingly. Before anything can be resolved, the implicit must be made into the explicit.

Successful people decide how they are going to live; they are not victims of circumstance. In good times or bad times, they know where they are going and they know that they are going to get there.

How do I know it was meant to happen this way? Because it did.

I also readily admit that there are animals, taken in the ordinary sense, that are incomparably larger than those we know of, and I have sometimes said in jest that there might be a system like ours which is the pocketwatch of some enormous giant.

It’s funny when people say, ‘I don’t think Julia likes me.’ Honey, if I don’t like you, you’re going to know about it.

Nothing you believe is true. To know this is freedom.

Asking yourself deeper questions opens up new ways of being in the world. It brings in a breath of fresh air. It makes life more joyful. The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery.