The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

Write whatever you like!

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

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.

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

I've been in the habit of helping people.

I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.