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

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.

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.

In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

Don’t always blindly follow guidance and step-by-step instructions; you might run into something interesting.

The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right.

I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.

Rule 1: When all else fails, follow instructions. And Rule 2: Don’t be an asshole.

The disciples obey because that’s what people do when someone rises from the dead and gives instructions.

We need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed.

History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future.