“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.”

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.

Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.

It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.

The end of art is peace.

If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.

I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.

The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.

The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

I’m for Barack Obama. We gotta have the Muslim cell in there just to piss Rush Limbaugh and the right wing off.

A lot of that we see today, where the Muslims are against the Christians and the Christians are against Jews and the Jews are against Arabs – I mean, it just it goes on and on and on.

In my experience, in the real-estate business past success stories are generally not applicable to new situations.

We intend to conduct our business in a way that not only meets but exceeds the expectations of our customers, business partners, shareholders, and creditors, as well as the communities in which we operate and society at large.

If anybody reads an Indian newspaper, all these things are obvious, and so I am not breaking news. All I am doing is representing my community as it actually is.

Also, I have to assume that readers are sophisticated enough to know that not every person in a community is the same, and so there are many people who would not force an abortion just because a fetus is female.

For me, I never ever felt the ownership or any identity with any community of disabilities. I didn’t grow up being told that I was a disabled child.

Where are the Muslim people’s sponsors? Where are its kings? Where are its leaders?