Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
Seamus Heaney
History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'
I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
The end of art is peace.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.
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.
There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.
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.
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.
Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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.
Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.
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.
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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.
You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.
The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.
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.
