I Drink To Keep Body And Soul

The Whole Relationship Between A Writer's Spiritual/emotional Condition And The Kind Of Wordstuff And Form-making That's Going On In His Work Is An Interesting One. When I Was An Undergraduate, There Was A Glib Notion Around That There Was No Reason To Suppose A Bad Man Could Be A Good Writer.

Hope Is Not Optimism, Which Expects Things To Turn Out Well, But Something Rooted In The Conviction That There Is Good Worth Working For.

I Can't Think Of A Case Where Poems Changed The World, But What They Do Is They Change People's Understanding Of What's Going On In The World.

I Have Always Thought Of Poems As Stepping Stones In One's Own Sense Of Oneself.

Loyalism, Or Unionism, Or Protestantism, Or Whatever You Want To Call It, In Northern Ireland - It Operates Not As A Class System, But A Caste System.