Quotes from Seamus Heaney

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

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.

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

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

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

The 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.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

Walk on air against your better judgement.

I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment.

The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

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.

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.

I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.

Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

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