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

“Everything flows. Even a solid man, a pillar to himself and to his trade…”

“Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.”

“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.”

“The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.”

“All I know is a door into the dark.”

“The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.”

“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.”

“I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.”

“There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. ”

“The end of art is peace.”

“Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says MOVE AGAIN.”

“I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.”

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

“Walk on air against your better judgement.”

“If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.”