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

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 best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.

The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.

What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Two-thirds of American movies are extensions of commercials — they tell you how to feel and they tell you how to think — rather than letting you figure it out on your own.

You’ll be a lot less likely to be caught up in bias or prejudice or be influenced by people who ask you to hand over your brains, your soul or your money because they have everything all figured out for you.

It’s not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It’s a picture of somebody trying to figure things out.

I was always interested in figuring things out. I’d do experiments, like combining things I found around the house to see what would happen if I put them together.

Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement.

When you look at some of the appointments, there`s great concern because does it really represent all the people, and somehow figuring out how to bring the nation together.

I do a lot of different things, sometimes at the same time, and it’s very difficult to figure out where I fit.

When I had independence, it was a constant battle within me to figure out when am I on my own.