“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.”

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.

I’ve been in the habit of helping people.

But the West is trying to weaken Islam from outside and inside. They attack our people and invade our countries from outside, and they weaken us from within with ideas like secularism, liberalism and democracy.

Love of Allah gives us spiritual life; hope in His Reward is the greatest incentive to do good; and fear of His Wrath stops us from evil.

But the weakness comes from these Westernised co-opted Muslim leaders who just want to look good in the eyes of the West and Western media.

In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientist.

There is no difference in the realization of the Truth either by a Muslim, Hindu, Zoroastrian, or a Christian. The difference is only in words and terms. Truth is not the monopoly of a particular race or religion.

Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.

Disrespect earns the displeasure of the creator and the creation.

All the Muslims are happy, and Godwilling this earthquake… will be felt right up to the White House.