Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me, otherwise kill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me, otherwise kill me.

I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity.

A harrassed and dubious childhood under the hand of a well-meaning but barbarous mother's help from County Armagh led me to think of the North of Ireland as prison and the South as a land of escape.

A poet should always be 'collaborating' with his public, but this public, in the mass, cannot make itself heard, and he has to guess at its requirements and its criticisms.

All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.

Broadcasting is plastic; while it can ape the press, it can also emulate the arts.

Dublin was hardly worried by the war; her old preoccupations were still preoccupations. The intelligentsia continued their parties; their mutual malice was as effervescent as ever.

For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one's poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community.

Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.

I am 33 years old, and what can I have been doing that I still am in a muddle? But everyone else is, too; maybe our muddles are concurrent.

I am at home in Dublin, more than in any other city.

I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.

I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.

In January 1921, I found myself wonderfully alone in an empty carriage in a rocking train in the night between Waterloo and Sherborne. Stars on each side of me; I ran from side to side of the carriage, checking the constellations.

My birth was managed so rottenly that my mother had eventually to have a hysterectomy, after which she was ill off & on till she dies for obscure reasons when I was just 7.

My sympathies are Left. On paper and in the soul. But not in my heart or my guts.

Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non.

Nationalism of the Irish type is often regarded as reactionary. With the World Revolution and the Classless Society waiting for the midwife, why take a torch to the stable to assist at the birth of a puppy? Even if the puppy is pedigree. On this question I am unable to make up my mind.

Some day I shall write a novel and call it 'A Walking Tour in the Congo' or 'Thrills and Spills in Aeronautics'; but I keep this type of title as a last & mercenary resort.

Style without content is bad style.

The individualist is an atom thinking about himself (Thank God I am not as other men); the communist, too often, is an atom having ecstasies of self-denial (Thank God I am one in a crowd).

The poet is primarily a spokesman, making statements or incantations on behalf of himself or others - usually for both, for it is difficult to speak for oneself without speaking for others or to speak for others without speaking for oneself.

The teapot takes in water and gives out tea. So the human individual takes in anything you give him and promptly transforms it; he is ready to give you out again his own reactions - first, in thought and emotion, then in voice or action.

We are all fed from hundreds and thousands of hands. Often we do not know whose they are nor how they work. Only a few of us ever visualize the hands that grope in the coal mines or push levers in the mills or handle axes in the lumber camp.

When I went to bed as a child, I was told, 'You don't know where you'll wake up.' When I ran in the garden, I was told that running was bad for the heart. Everything had its sinister aspect - milk shrinks the stomach, lemon thins the blood.

You can't express emotion without giving information.

Dublin was hardly worried by the war her old preoccupations were still preoccupations. The intelligentsia continued their parties their mutual malice was as effervescent as ever.

Electric cars are not going to take the market by storm but its going to be a gradual improvement.

India's a fascinating country. It's constantly changing, but there's still a lot of superstition and backwards thinking.

I'm just rich. I own businesses and I love it.

I was missing out on a lot of things that my friends were doing, but in another way, they were missing things I was doing. It was kind of a trade-off I had to make.

I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty. That the reasons flyers fly whether they know it or not is the aesthetic appeal of flying.

Everyone seemed to want a piece of Ronald Reagan. It was maddening.

I feel like my place in this industry is still progressing.

I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story.

I think if you have ability and talent in one way, you have it in all ways. I'm not a jack of all trades; I'm a master of many. I don't feel there is anything I can't do if I want to.

Choose between yesterday and tomorrow.

You can be committed to Church but not committed to Christ, but you cannot be committed to Christ and not committed to church.

Nurture the qualities in yourself that you desire in your friends.

In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.

I am generally cast as the dependable, affable, loving, friend-wife-girlfriend.

When I was doing the first 'American Pie' movie, I was just happy to have a job. We had a good time, and it was a great group of people, but like any project that I've worked on in my career, you just put your best foot forward, and you're all working together to make the best movie possible.

Let planning be the springboard, so that spirituality can be our splash.

To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.

If I were the president of the United States, I would make unions illegal. They no longer serve a functional purpose in democracy, in my view.

I once saw an elaborate landscape in a gallery, drawn in pencil, that took my breath away. Then I realized the artist probably didn't have enough confidence to use a pen.

Men like to provide for women and their families. It's in their DNA. I'm obviously no scientist, but I bet if you could hear a Y-chromosome talk, it would say, 'I want to provide and hunt.' When the woman is the primary breadwinner, it's going against nature. I'm not saying that it's bad or wrong, I'm just saying that it can feel off.

Music is such an odd thing when you think about it - behind an image until you take it away, and then you realize a movie sounds blank without it.