Paul Muldoon

“I love adventure stories.”

“I don't shape trends, I'd say. I merely reflect them. I think the emphasis is on 'them.' I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.”

“I met Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley on the same day in 1968. I was sixteen at the time. Very exciting. They were reading at Armagh. One of my teachers brought me to meet them, introduced me, and I became friends with them.”

“Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.”

“At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I'm certain. Poems were shorter than essays.”

“I do believe that we've a responsibility to try to acknowledge the range, both geographic and graphic, of what's happening in poetry in English. I'm interested in poems that are first-rate. After that, I'm not too concerned if they come from Queens or Queensland.”

“I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.”

“On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.”

“Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time.”

“It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.”

“We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.”

“The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.”

“One is constantly trying to figure out what came together in one's childhood. Lots of people spend significant portions of their lives in therapy - especially in the States - trying to work out who they are. I'm certain there is a little of that in the business of writing. That would explain why certain images and themes recur.”

“The best thing anybody has ever done is to advise me against publishing a poem that shows me at less than my best, such as it is. That's the kind of advice most of us resist but really should relish.”

“I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.”

“I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.”

“Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.”

“The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.”

“I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish.”

“That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.”