I do a lot of readings.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

I do a lot of readings.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme.

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

The ground swell is what's going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I'm sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too.

Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.

At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I'm certain. Poems were shorter than essays.

Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.

I met Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley on the same day in 1968. I was sixteen at the time. Very exciting. They were reading at Armagh. One of my teachers brought me to meet them, introduced me, and I became friends with them.

I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

Independent film is almost nonexistent right now, because all the distributers that used to love to put out these little art films are all out of business right now, because it costs so much to open a movie.

If we hold the poverty thought, the penury thought, the thought of lack, we cannot demonstrate abundance. We must hold the plenty thought if we would reach plenty.

Let me ask you: Should only children of the wealthy have access to quality early education? Should only children of the wealthy have access to a college degree? The answer - the only answer - is: no.

I love being on set.

It gives me a very keen satisfaction that, after listening to my blather all those years, former students are now seeing that I wrote a book, that I did have it in me.

The pillory and stocks, the gibbet, and even the whipping-post, have seen many a noble victim, many a martyr. But I cannot think any save the most ignoble criminals ever sat in a ducking-stool.

If we invest in ourselves, the collective good, we all thrive.

I am free.

If you move to Canada, after a few years you call yourself Canadian. In Germany, it's difficult to belong.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

I very much wanted to live in Paris when I was in the army, and I was quite determined to. I could have become a dress designer: Dior was willing to take me on as an assistant, but he did not have an immediate vacancy.

'Magneto' believes that 'Cyclops' and 'Wolverine' both serve a good purpose. But he believes the help they provide only goes so far.

My heart has always been truly convinced that in serving the cause of America, I am fighting for the interests of France.

I sometimes read about authors who say they require a perfectly silent room maintained at precisely 68 degrees, with trash bags taped over the windows and a white-noise machine in the corner to write, and I think, 'Who are these people, and do any of them have kids?'

I'm either sitting very still or running very fast.

I thought that, as a black audience member, I would like to see something that reflected an experience that's not normally exhibited in documentaries, or is so much about black people as victims in this country, and black people not taking control of their own lives and their own destinies.

We are not retreating we are advancing in another direction.

It is time for you to change your negative thoughts and beliefs and stop being your worst enemy of progress.

The press is a watchdog. Not an attack dog. Not a lapdog. A watchdog. Now, a watchdog can't be right all the time. He doesn't bark only when he sees or smells something that's dangerous. A good watchdog barks at things that are suspicious.

I'm a big fan of the Irish accent. After a couple of drinks, I start to get a bit of an Irish lilt, too.

Human beings have speculated about the relationship between inspiration and insanity for centuries.