Seamus Heaney Quotes

Author Image

Seamus Heaney

Profession : Poet

Birth : April 13, 1939

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

Seamus Heaney

Write whatever you like!

Seamus Heaney

The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.

Seamus Heaney

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

Seamus Heaney

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.

Seamus Heaney

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

Seamus Heaney

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

Seamus Heaney

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

Seamus Heaney

What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

Seamus Heaney

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

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

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

Seamus Heaney

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

Seamus Heaney

If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.

Seamus Heaney

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

Seamus Heaney

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

I spend almost every morning with mail.

Seamus Heaney

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

Seamus Heaney

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

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.

Seamus Heaney