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

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 want to feel good, I want to feel proud, I want to feel that I give someone enough and that I get enough.

You should never feel comfortable. There is something wrong if you are. You should always feel under threat, on the edge of your seat and pushing yourself. Win one and you want to win more. It's never-ending.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is not in their power to help themselves.

Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

If I had to come up with something that just came to me, I think growing up in a small town, I want knowledge. I still think today, knowledge is one of the keys.

I want to thank all the fans for their support over the years. Keep supporting the Knicks, we're moving in the right direction here and we will be exciting to watch and competing against the best in the NBA. Come back to the Garden for those exciting games.

If you want something that's going to provide you with a lot of challenges and a variety of different things to do, then you really can't beat a place like the Air Force. I don't mean this to sound like a recruiting pitch. But it's been a lot of fun.

I want to spend more time with those kids. I want to dedicate my time to train those kids and teach them what it takes, what they need to do to get to this level.

Young actors often don't think of the consequences of doing nudity or sex scenes. They want the role so badly that they agree to be exploited, and then end up embarrassing family, friends, and even strangers.

At one point in your life, you'll have the thing you want or the reasons why you don't.

It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.

Once you drink one glass, you want another.

If you want to grow old as a pilot, you've got to know when to push it, and when to back off.

I don't want any more vicissitudes, I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I've had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.

Women don't like advice. They don't want you to fix their problems, they just want you to listen.

Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.