Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.

All I know is a door into the dark

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's term "slip" from you.

One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest was Requiem for the Croppies, written 50 years after 1916 [the year of the Easter Rising]. Being responsible and what it means, what it demands, have indeed preoccupied me maybe too much. But this is it, this is the thing, this is what you're up against.