A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

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.

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

There is not built-in meaning to anything, we are free to add any meaning we choose to give it.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

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.