What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

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

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

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.

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

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

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

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

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

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

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

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

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

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

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

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

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