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.
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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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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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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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You yourself don’t have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.
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Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.
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My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
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In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
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Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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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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Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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