My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
SEAMUS HEANEYMy father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
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At home in Ireland, there’s a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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Write whatever you like!
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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.
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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.
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In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
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History says, ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave.’
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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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Sonnet is about movement in a form.
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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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My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
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I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.
SEAMUS HEANEY