“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.”

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

My attitude is govern as if you’ve run your last race. That’s not to say I’ve run my last race, but govern with a liberation and a freedom; change your mind frame to operate that way.

Books are mute as far as sound is concerned. It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two ‘languages.’ It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves.

When things are not going right, there are satanic forces in operation. What is my solution? To rebuke the condition of sin, death, disease, or whatever it is. I can pray in the Holy Ghost, and that prayer is effectual to bring down every stronghold of the enemy.

If you don’t understand how to run an efficient operation, new machinery will just give you new problems of operation and maintenance.

The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the state governments, in times of peace and security.

Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.

Just as the police review their operational tactics, so we in the Home Office will review the powers available to the police.

Its operation in a world beset by fuel and energy crises makes no sense at all.