“A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.”

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.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

One of the rules of caution is not to be too cautious.

There are successful scholars, public-spirited scholars, upright scholars, cautious scholars, and those who are merely petty men.

If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.

We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!

The negative cautions of science are never popular.

If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending.

Such caution seems especially warranted with regard to the sharp rise in equity prices during the past two years. These gains have obviously raised questions of sustainability.