“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to 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.

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.

I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight, but of course I believe in two people having chemistry right away.

I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.

The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway.

I actually find in America, there’s a slight snobbery about actors who go back and forth between big heavy dramas and popcorn fare. That always intrigues me, because that doesn’t exist in the same way in Britain. And I imagine it would be worse.

Past dreams of bliss our lives contain, And slight the chords that still retain A heart estranged to joys again,

It turned out that time doesn’t heal the wound , but in its so merciful way , blunts the edges ever so slightly

Compared to the American public at large, probably a slightly higher percentage of journalists, because of thier enhanced power of discernment, realize they know a gay person or two, and are, therefore, less frightened of them.

The utmost movements that he allows are a slight quivering of her muscular integuments.