I shall gain glory or die.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

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

I drink to keep body and soul apart.