The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

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

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

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

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.