“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 think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

I’ve been in the habit of helping people.

My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

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.

I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

In England, the system is benign and the people are hostile. In America, the people are friendlyand the system is brutal!

Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.

I do a level 18 on the elliptical at four miles an hour for 20 minutes. That’s 360 calories. I want to see someone else try that. The resistance factor at 18 is brutal. No one goes to 20.

Sometimes all it takes to help someone survive anything brutal are those six words: ‘None of it was your fault.

But I was brutal and violent in a way they tell women not to be.

It was better walk with dignity than ride in shame. A lot of people in Cincinnati are saying, “Rather than have the continual problems of police brutality and economic disparity,