“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.”

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.

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

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.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

It is through beauty that we arrive at freedom.

But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you’ve got to compromise. You’ve got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward.

In general, we are sort of conditioned to see a different body type as acceptable and maybe look away when the other body type arrives.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

The end comes when the infinites arrive.

The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb.

In flying, the probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival.