It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.