The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.

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.

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

Allow ourselves to do as Ram Dass said in his delicious phrase "Be Here Now." If you are here now you cannot fall into falsely constructed gender projections.

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