On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.

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.

I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.

I came to this world just to give love, just to fill the world with silent song of love, just to feel and share the power of love, just to sing the song of dedication to love.

Beneath all this he is able to identify as well the dangers of a humanism which shuts out the humane and transcendent horizons and can threaten a new form of the dark night of the soul.

Netanyahu is pressured easily, gets into a panic, and loses his senses... to run a country like Israel a leader needs to have reason and judgment and nerves of steel, two traits he does not have.

All through the nineties I met people. Crowds of people. Met and met and met, until it seemed that people were born and hastily grew up, just to be met.

All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.

I think free-to-play is both exciting and also really dangerous.

Every word that judges value is circular. 'Good' is 'right' is 'proper' is 'just' is 'good'. But check the examples, and they're not circular at all: Every one says 'makes me happy'.

Real men don't use instructions, son. Besides, this is just the manufacturer's opinion on how to put this together.

I hope that being in places from the [Shinzo Abe] Prime Minister's past will motivate us to have a sincere, very practical and, I hope, productive conversation.