Quotes from Seamus Heaney

And a young prince must be prudent like that, giving freely while his father lives so that afterwards, in age when fighting starts steadfast companions will stand by him and hold the line.

Fate goes ever as fate must.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.

Meanwhile, the sword began to wilt into gory icicles, to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing, the way it all melted as ice melts when the Father eases the fetters off the frost and unravels the water-ropes. He who wields power over time and tide: He is the true Lord.

I've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

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.

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

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

One doesn't want one's identity coerced.

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

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.

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.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

If self is a location, so is love.

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

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.

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

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

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

There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know.