It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up

I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too