One 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.
SEAMUS HEANEYIn a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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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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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
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I don’t do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.
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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 believe we are put here to improve civilisation.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
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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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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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I’m a firm believer in learning by heart.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.
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Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
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Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
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The end of art is peace.
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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.
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The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
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