Your temperament is what you write with, but it’s also how you deal with the world.
SEAMUS HEANEYIt is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
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Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland – it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.
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If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.
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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
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I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman – these are public value-founders.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
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In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
SEAMUS HEANEY