At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

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

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

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

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

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

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.

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

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

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

When I first encountered the name of the city of 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.

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

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

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.