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

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

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