“The end of art is peace.”

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.

You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.

At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.

I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

When you start with an idea, or something hits you, then you have to follow that through to the end, and it’s the following through to the end that makes the pattern. That, for me, is choreography.

Peace begins When expectation ends.

Power is the supreme end for all those who have not understood.

Everyone starts strong. Success comes to those with unwavering commitment to be at the end.

If I believe that I am right, I will take it to the end of the earth until I am proven right.

Everything has a beginning and an ending. Make peace with that and all will be well…In life we cannot avoid change, we cannot avoid loss. Freedom and happiness are found in the flexibility and ease with which we move through change.

At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?

All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.