“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.

But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.

A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

A sign of a culture that has lost its faith – Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse.

Charity, especially towards the vulnerable, is the best opportunity we have to keep working to build up a culture of encounter.

Create the kind of workplace and company culture that will attract great talent. If you hire brilliant people, they will make work feel more like play.

Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.

A race of people is like and individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.

Mr. Bean is essentially a child trapped in the body of a man. All cultures identify with children in a similar way, so he has this bizarre global outreach.