I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.
SEAMUS HEANEYThe 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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.
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I suppose you could say my father’s world was Thomas Hardy and my mother’s D.H. Lawrence.
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I’ve been in the habit of helping people.
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The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.
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A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
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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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A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
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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.
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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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The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.
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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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I’ve said it before about the Nobel Prize: it’s like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.
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As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that’s what publication does.
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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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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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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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Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
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We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.
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I don’t think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.
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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.
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Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic.
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