Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.
SEAMUS HEANEYPoetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
-
-
The problem as you get older, is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There’s no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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 HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I think that water is immediately interesting. It’s just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright – it reflects you.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Sonnet is about movement in a form.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The completely solitary self: that’s where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
SEAMUS HEANEY -
Write whatever you like!
SEAMUS HEANEY -
History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
SEAMUS HEANEY -
The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
SEAMUS HEANEY