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

Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time

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

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.

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.

Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

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