Emotion Quote by Michael Longley

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

— Michael Longley

I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

— Michael Longley

Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

— Michael Longley

In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You…

— 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 work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find…

— Michael Longley

The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to go to…

— Michael Longley

Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas…

— Michael Longley

I hardly ever look at my published books.

— Michael Longley

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

— Michael Longley

For me the form, the stanzaic shape, is an endorsement, proof that I'm engaged with the Latin or Greek at an original level, that…

— 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…

— Michael Longley