I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.

I know now that I began writing in a country where the word 'woman' and the word 'poet' were almost magnetically opposed. One word was used to invoke collective nurture, the other to sketch out self-reflective individualism. Both states were necessary - that much the culture conceded - but they were oil and water and could not be mixed.

Basically, people in other countries don't want to have to work quite as flat-out as they do in Japan.

The twentieth century had produced a literature in Ireland that kept a tense distance from the sources of faith - and for good reason. Irish writing had suffered a terrible censorship in the twentieth century.

I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.