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

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.

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.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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