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

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.

I like doing accents. One of my friends works in hotel reservations and I'll ring her up and complain about the suite. Sometimes I get her.

I am desperate for change - now - not in 8 years or 12 years, but right now.

Preparing food is one of life's great joys, but a lot of times, parents ask their kids if they want to cook with them and then tell them to go peel a bag of potatoes. That's not cooking - that's working!

The future is limitless.

For me, relationships are the real action movies. Bombs are exploding every day and the kitchen is Ground Zero.

It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up.

To involve young people and make sure that the system is more relevant to them in Scotland, we have a clear obligation to implement a policy of home rule.

The issue isn't just jobs. Even slaves had jobs. The issue is wages.

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

Look, every guy is nervous when they talk to girls, but I find that little bit of nervousness to be kind of fun.

I prefer the country life. I live in Kingston, but there is lots of trees.

If I think I'm going to get into trouble I always say that I'm sick.

Whenever I've had success, I never learn from it. Success usually breeds a degree of hubris. When you fail, that's when you learn.

I do want to have children, but my parents had me when they were in their forties. I'd like to copy that.

Your thoughts are transparent.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

Russia knows of the vulnerability of her frontiers in this part of the world.

Christmas cookies can't help but be retro - they are memory first, sugar-flour-egg-redhot-gumdrop-sparkle reality second.

I only do this because Im having fun. The day I stop having fun Ill just walk away.

There is nothing new about these Republican attacks on our family planning decisions. In fact, from the moment they came into power, Republicans in the House of Representatives have been waging a war on women's health.

It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you become really committed to winning and become a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom.