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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

My experience is that prose usually equals duty – last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Equal Evidence Experience Writing
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Design Fear Finding Myself Place Superstition Writing
Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Absolute Admire Greatness Lyrics Poetry
My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Children Father Mom Myself
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Big Listening Myself Speaker
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

Best Description Himself Myself Writing
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fact Lyrics Medium Poetry Recognition Truth
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Group Necessary Sustainable Writing
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Fake Intense Poetry Utter
I’m very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination – poets in particular.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Conscious Imagination Myself People Poet
The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Poet World
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

Death Light Myself Obsession Personally
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Expression Solid Stress True Work Writing
I spend almost every morning with mail.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Mail Morning Myself
In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work – the hay in the summertime, for example.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Family Farm Funeral Kind Representation Work
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.
SEAMUS HEANEY

Generation Important Myself University Win

I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.

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I’m not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades – it ’tis.

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Popular Authors

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