“I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.”

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.

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

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

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

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

We certainly don’t want them to do anything that’s going to affect themselves in an adverse way or affect our program, our university, or our team in an adverse way.

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion.

I feel like everyone who goes to The University of Texas is blessed and lucky to be there because they’re getting a chance to be as good as they can be.

My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.

The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.

One doesn’t need a university diploma to realize that the ruler is oppressive and corrupt.