“What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.”

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 came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.

I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

I spend almost every morning with mail.

Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

My soul is that of a drummer. I didn’t do it to become rich and famous. I did it because it was the love of my life.

I think anybody who’s famous has to deal with their fame in their own way.

This [discovery of a cell-free yeast extract] will make him famous

Celebrities and ‘famous’ people are just regular folks. I know, it’s a shocking and potentially dangerous statement.

The most famous person in my phone is Lindsay Lohan. We starred in ‘Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen’ together in 2004 and we’ve stayed in touch.

The finest mode of transport known to man.

I am super-proud to have a sort of famous character in my background that if you’re a certain age, he was probably a part of your youth. I think that’s pretty cool.

I don’t think rock ‘n roll is necessarily a young man’s game. I think Neil Young is just as rock’n’roll now as he was in his 20s.