“The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.”

“More than loud acclaim, I loveBooks, silence, thought, my alcove.Pangur BánPoem by Anon Irish Monk, Translated by Seamus Heaney”

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

“Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.”

“In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.”

“The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.”

“Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.”

“Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.”

“I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.”

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

“Poetry is more a threshold than a path.”