I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
SEAMUS HEANEYI think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Write whatever you like!
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Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.
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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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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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I spend almost every morning with mail.
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My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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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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The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don’t have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
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I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
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You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.
SEAMUS HEANEY