I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
SEAMUS HEANEYWithout needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
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Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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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Since I was a schoolboy, I’ve been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.
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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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It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them. They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
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In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.
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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.
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My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.
SEAMUS HEANEY