I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

Ordinary will please, but never impress.

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

The grass is yellow on both sides, envy turning on of them green.

No good man ever became suddenly rich.

Great risks come in long term, tremendously assiduous, very courageous study.

There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened.

The smallest sin is an act of Cosmic Treason against a Holy God.

The LSD experience usually changes forever the worldview and basic life-orientation of all who experience it

If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.

Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.