When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I r…

- Michael Longley

Weddings and funerals have so much in common (except that in Ireland funerals are more fun - better food, better drink): at both, our senses are shar…

- Michael Longley

I do feel that a poem needs not just space, but, ideally, space around that space - space for meditation, reverie, subliminal link-ups. I sense that …

- Michael Longley

I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.

- Michael Longley

I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to …

- Michael Longley

I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of k…

- Michael Longley

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

- Michael Longley

Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."

- Michael Longley

I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.

- Michael Longley