Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.

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.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

I felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity, Guantnamo Bay and all the rest of it. But the poems at the start of District and Circle Anahorish 1944, The Aerodromearent particularly aimed as criticism. On the contrary, there's a recognition of the big contribution to world order made in Europe during World War II.