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

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 always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians.

We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about – farming replacing hunting.

We really don’t have an honest-to-goodness farm, more of a hobby farm.

My family and I reside on a non-working farm, although we have a couple of horses and the usual stuff like pigs, cows, and chickens.

They’ve had local rightwing guys who’ve become national rightwing guys, and who build slowly, and that’s how it goes. We haven’t had that. It isn’t like we have a farm team.

People lucky enough to live in the vicinity of an industrial hog farm are, with each breath, made keenly aware of the cause of their declining property values.

If I were to leave the U.S., I’d live in England. But I’d never leave the U.S. I own a 400-acre farm in Macon, Georgia. I raise cattle and hogs. I own horses, too. I love horses as much as singing. I like to hunt on horseback.

Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.