“Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.”

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

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.

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.

I think revolution is always a little bit possible. I think it won’t look or sound anything like what we would expect. But I think revolution is very difficult, and I’m not optimistic for any kind of dramatic change.

Stop being so optimistic. It’s getting on my nerves.

I’m pretty optimistic about the future of rock… it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz.

I don’t have any regrets because I’m very optimistic, and live each day as though it’s the last.

My parents said marrying was an optimistic thing to do in pessimistic times.

Stop being so optimistic, its getting on my nerves. No problem. Do you want me to be all gloom and doom or just shut up? Just shut up. Can do. Really? Doesn’t seem like it.

Always be looking for the opportunities, and always be optimistic about what you can do with that opportunity.

I’m an optimistic guy. I’m one of those big dreamers. I’m one of those kids with that annoying imagination.