I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you got started, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.

Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

It seems to me that metaphors come down to a certain idea of interconnectedness - that everything relates to everything else. Metaphors don't believe in autonomy. And in the end, perhaps that idea of interconnectedness is a moral position.

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.

I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way onto the page, but I've been reading more and more American poetry and I certainly feel it as quite a freeing force. Coming from the formally ordered tradition of poetry in Ireland, I find the expansiveness of American literature freeing in some sense.

New York is great for writers insofar as you can pay someone to bring you food, to take your washing out and bring it back clean. It enables you. Writers always feel guilty when they're doing anything but writing, and New York allows you to really write all the time if you want to - though my kids put a limit on it.

I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you got started, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.