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

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.

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.

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.

There’s a terrible danger in voting for the lesser of two evils because the parties can set it up that way.

Our bridge to the future must include bridges to other nations, because we remain the world’s indispensable nation to advance prosperity, peace and freedom and to keep our own children safe from the dangers of terror and weapons of mass destruction.

The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

You reach a dangerous level of independence the moment you realize you are beating.

Insufficient facts always invite danger.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

I fear we are in danger of forgetting that to HAVE the Bible is one thing, and to READ it quite another.

There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.