Quotes from Seamus Heaney

My passport's green.

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.

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.

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.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

Part of my gradual education of myself has been to think that there is a deep relationship between the nature of the creature and the worth of the art.

The end of art is peace.

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.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

All I know is a door into the dark

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

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.

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

History says, Don't hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

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.

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.