I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
SEAMUS HEANEYSince 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.
More Seamus Heaney Quotes
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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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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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The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.
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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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Write whatever you like!
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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.
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Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.
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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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I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.
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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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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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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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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.
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There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know.
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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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What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.
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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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The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.
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Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
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The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
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Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
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There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.
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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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One doesn’t want one’s identity coerced.
SEAMUS HEANEY