“I spend almost every morning with mail.”

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.

I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for 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 have received hostile voice mail messages and e-mails. They are often anonymous, I’m sad to say, as anonymous messages are delivered only by very low forms of human life, in my opinion.

Oh, that dog! Ever hear of a German Shepherd that bites its nails? Barks with a lisp? You say, “Attack!” And he has one. All he does is piddle. He’s nothing but a fur-covered kidney that barks.

There should be no censorship of mail.

They’re calling me. I’m getting nonstop e-mails and calls now from people that have been scammed by Donald Trump. And their stories are heartbreaking.

Have all been the means in the hands of God of driving the nails into the self-life which so easily complains.

It would have been better if the United Nations had sent a team to Mali right away to mediate between the government and the rebels. But where is the political initiative?

So I get the mail, open it up, deal with it then.

I gave her address to my soul. Ans she fucked the mailman.