Poet

It's ironic that early on in the war with Afghanistan, the Americans and the British were saying, 'We recognise there must be a Palestinian state,' then they rapidly forgot about it. I think history will show that that kind of amnesia will come back to haunt you.

You are either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist.

I'm kind of domestic, untidily so.

I think ideas should be flying about and banging into each other. It is a kind of energy. If you occupy static positions, then things sort of ossify.

I do most of the cooking. I'm kind of domestic, untidily so.

Many black people I know are proud of the Irish part of their heritage - an Irish grandparent, say - but they recognise that many people believe in a form of racial purity. And it is from that belief that prejudice starts.

One of the strongest features of Puritanism is its autobiographical tendency, its passionate self-regard.

I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all.

In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel... it is a product of both British and Stalin's anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction.

Everyone who supports Israel is a Zionist.

I do think culture is an argument, and that was part of the way I was brought up. People at a social occasion in Ireland will start shouting and arguing. When the Yeats family lived in Bedford Park, they had to go round to the neighbours to say, 'You might think we are fighting, but this is the way we talk to each other.'

I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come.

Teachers are the ministers and priests of culture, its practitioners and its emissaries.

Again and again, I find something eerie in many Irish occasions - the unrelenting whiteness, the emotional tribal attachments, the violent prejudices lurking beneath apparently pleasant social surfaces, the cosy smugness of belonging.

I don't think the British carry a historical consciousness either.

Look, you're either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist: there's no middle way. Everyone who supports the state of Israel is a Zionist.

Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.'

My parents were Northern Ireland Labour party people. We read the 'Guardian' and the 'New Statesman,' listened to the BBC. The house was full of books. We didn't get a television until 'That Was The Week That Was' started. There was nothing to do but read.

I went to a grim Victorian school with classes of 40 or 50 children. It was a very rigid and unimaginative education, but it did teach us the three Rs.

Hitler bombed London into submission but in fact it created a sense of national solidarity.