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 HEANEYOne of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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Write whatever you like!
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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But that citizen’s perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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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Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
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When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.
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The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.
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It’s difficult to learn poems off by heart that don’t rhyme.
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The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain’s and the body’s systems is inestimable. It’s like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn’t grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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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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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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